I had set my favourite AI interface (Claude.ai, if you must know) a fairly complex task last week. I fed in our annual vehicle usage, our thoughts on the kind of car we were thinking of buying, our budget, our preference for either hybrid or pure EV and asked him (it?) for some suggestions.

Then we did the same with Chat-GPT and surprisingly (or maybe not) they agreed on three cars with the latter suggesting a fourth.  But there was a line in one of their comprehensive summaries which made me think.

Claude said that because I live in an apartment, I should consider the size of the parking space, especially if it’s an older building.

Once I’d got over the mild shock of Claude knowing I live in a unit, I wondered how many people – especially downsizers who love their giant 4WDs, luxury cars and crew cab utes – consider that they may have to also shrink their preferred mode of transport when they leave their empty nests.

In the much-touted but unsurprisingly short-lived plan to allow owners corporations to invite local council parking officers to patrol high-rise car parks, one of the “be careful what you wish for” aspects was that they would observe the building’s by-laws religiously and fine people who parked over the lines denoting the borders between their car space and the common property driveways.

In any event the plan was abandoned because Health and Safety would not permit parking wardens to operate in enclosed areas.

But getting back to the size of car spaces, there are no hard and fast rules but standards that are expected to be observed (basically a minimum width of 2.4 metres and length of 5.4 metres.)

Such a car space would be of little use to the owners of a Chevrolet Silverado, currently the biggest ute on Australian roads at 6.4 metres long, while the Toyota Tundra would be half a metre over the line of a standard car space.

So what do you do if your beloved ride is too big for your car space? And what should strata committees do if a resident’s vehicle is protruding into the common property passageway. Building standard for parking spaces also suggest optimum turning circles.

The latter question has insurance implications because those vehicles are obstructing passageways. By the way, did you know that if a car park driveway is longer than 100 metres it must have a speed bump halfway along? No? Me neither.

The Australian standard for parking spaces was based on the dimensions (including the door opening arc), of a 1978 Ford Falcon.

Now planners are having to consider aspects such as EV charging and passenger drop-off areas for self-driving cars. It’s all so complicated but should we be scared of AI?

A friend took all the technical information provided by his indoor golf app (another dangerous obsession) and fed it into Claude who told him what was wrong with his swing and how to fix it. Can we trust AI to help us with complex decisions? Dare we not?

I have to go now as Claude wants me to measure the dimensions of our car space before he’ll commit to recommending any one car.

A version of column originally appeared with the Flat Chat newsletter which goes out every week, free of charge.