Video: The Great Backup Challenge

No matter how many luxuries your car has, any city driver will tell you that there's a familiar pain in the neck you'll always have to deal with and that's parallel parking, until now. Car makers have added cameras to vehicles and they don't just see behind you. They can see all around you in some cases. Some cars even have power steering systems that work in concert with those cameras and other sensors to help park your car by itself, with you behind the wheel of course. And it's not just luxury cars that have these options, car makers as ordinary as Ford offer them. We have four such systems and we're going to test them out. The Nissan Pathfinders around view monitor, which kind of shows you a top-down bird's eye view of what's around the vehicle. And we have three systems that actually self park the vehicle, the Ford Escape comes with Ford's optional active park assist, which self parks while the Land Rover Range Rover Evoque has park assist as well as a surround camera system that shows you different angles around the vehicle. Finally, Mercedes-Benz brings Parktronic with active parking assist, which combines a surrounding camera view with auto parking. Whether it's a system that helps you park the car, or just gives you a full surround view so you can park it yourself, the real challenge is how easy it makes that process. I'm going to put them to the test along with help from James R. Healey auto writer for USA today, and Cars.com editor in chief, Patrick Olsen. The ground rules, we have two SUV's parked next to a rock wall. That's going to create our simulated parallel parking spot. Based on our four vehicles that we're testing, we're going to give each one an additional three feet from the front bumper and three feet from the rear bumper to park in this spot. We'll give each editor a few trials and take the fastest time. We'll also take impressions of which car was easiest to park. So from those two scores, we'll come up with a winner. (engine humming) Ford Escape system is interesting. It's pretty easy to use, but it seems a little busier, does a lot of backing and forthing, and isn't quite as zip zip, as you might expect. <v Kelsey>The Ford Escape had one of the easiest systems to use I thought, it wasn't super quick but it had all the instructions overlaid on the camera and a nice big screen to show you where you were going to go. The Nissan I expected it to be easier because I would just put it into reverse and see the all around camera. But I discovered that the other systems with the automatic steering was way more responsive and way faster than I expected it to be. <v James>The Nissan Pathfinder system is cameras. It's not an auto park, or self park. You do the parking, but it gives you a great view. It doesn't exactly stitch together a seamless 360 degree view. It actually leaves little gaps kind of at the corners, which leaves you guessing as you're getting close to that wall. Mercedes system, no surprise shows that if you pay a lot of money for a vehicle, you get a system with a lot of technology. <v James>It's pretty quick getting you back in the space. Doesn't back and forth a lot, gets you where it wants pretty quickly. <v Kelsey>And with all the tire tracers showed you where you were going to go going forward and backward as well as a pretty seamlessly stitched together 360 degree view. It's definitely the most aggressive with helping you out. I actually thought it did a pretty good job of it to. <v Patrick>The Range Rover was the system I knew the least about, but I had found it the easiest and the fastest one to park with. <v Kelsey>The Range Rover Evoque proved fairly easy, although Land Rover's surround camera system is kind of buried into sub menus and it throws out a bunch of different screens that are supposed to show you what's around the vehicle, and none of them really gave a good sense of where you were. The Evoque is a really good system. The printing on the instrument panels maybe a little small for some people, but it's pretty easy to read. And it does a very good job of zipping you into the space. You want that if you're in an urban situation, cause people are backing up behind you. (engine humming) So there's your winner, for more details on how we scored each vehicle. Check back on Cars.com and usatoday.com. <v Announcer>For more car related news, go to Cars.com or our blog, KickingTires.net.