From the ever-entertaining Austrian Times comes this New Year tale of genius…

Shopping centre bosses are offering women customers something to cushion the blow of a sales splurge – a special padded car park. The centres – in Peking and spread across all of northern China – feature women-only car park sections with wider spaces and colour coded walls to make them easier to spot. The purple and pink colour scheme is supposed to ease the anxiety women feel when trying to reverse into a parking space, psychologists have advised the designers. And even the pillars are padded with foam to soften the impact of parking shunts. Wanxiang-Tiancheng shopping centre director Wang Zheng in Hebei denied that the spaces are sexist but said they appeal to women’s “strong sense of colour and different sense of distance.” “There is a scientific basis for all this. Women have a poorer sense of distance when they are locked inside a small space. “That is why female drivers often bump the front and back of their cars. There is also a 15 per cent greater chance that a woman will whack her car door into another car when she opens it,” he added. “Each parking space is three metres wide, much larger than normal parking spaces and there is more CCTV to help women feel safer,” he explained. 

Not sure if this is original news or if the Austrian Times has only just noticed it elsewhere, but it’s a new one on us. Just don’t mention it to the missus…