Unless you’ve managed to squeeze a cabin cruiser into your garage, your car is probably the most expensive thing in it.

While the general feeling is that, once it’s in the garage, your car is ‘protected’, the reality can be quite different.

From something falling off a shelf and damaging the car, to scratching it as you work around it, or the kids leaning their bikes against it, there are many ways that the garage can be a bit of a hostile environment for your car.

So, while your garage protects your car from things like sun and snow, there are other hazards in the garage that can actually make it quite damaging to your car.

Protect Your Car in the Garage

The following are just some of the ways you can safeguard your car while it’s in the garage.

1. Close the Garage Door

In summer, it’s easy to just leave the garage door open some days because you’re in and out of the garage so often. In winter, you might open the door to warm-up the car before you leave for the day. Sometimes you might stop the garage door opener before the door closes completely.

It’s no surprise, but a car insurance company published information that shows open garage doors make it more likely that your car will be stolen.

To put it another way, the old movie “Gone in 60 Seconds” had it right. It takes less than a minute for a thief to drive off in your car. In fact, some estimates put it down to 10 seconds!    

2. Park in the Right Spot

Parking your car in the garage as far away from hazards as possible, and even not hitting anything as you park it, goes a long way to protecting it. But that can be tough to do when it’s difficult to know exactly how close you are to objects.

One of the most popular, and simple, ways to park your car perfectly every time is the “tennis-ball-from-the-ceiling” trick. It begins by finding the perfect place for your car to come to a stop while parking it in the garage. You may need someone outside the car to help you.

Once you find the spot, hang a tennis ball from the ceiling so that, as you park, it would contact the windshield in line with your rearview mirror. Every time you park, when the tennis ball touches the windshield at a point in line with the mirror, you know the car is perfectly aligned front and back and side-to-side. And if it doesn’t quite line up every time, you’ll know just how far off you are and can decide whether that’s good enough.

Or you can try a more 21st-century approach with garage door opener manufacturer Liftmaster’s laser-guided parking assist accessory.

3. Stop Dinging Your Doors

Even if you find the perfect parking spot to minimize damage to your car, you still might need to be careful when you open the doors. If not, the door can hit the garage wall or another object in the garage. You can attach pool noodles on the wall or objects the doors might hit to stop them from being damaged.

Needless to say, it’s worth doing everything you can to protect the most expensive thing in your garage. If you’re looking for a more secure garage door or garage door opener, call us at 905-472-9178  or contact us online.