Google Maps Street View vehicles have documented over five million miles of the world’s streets since they launched in 2007.
So it’s little wonder that occasionally they capture scenes that people would rather they didn’t.
These days, it’s much harder to get away with things like bad parking than it was before the technology existed to stitch together photos of the world.
One such incident occurred in Brussels recently, when the owner of a small car had trouble finding a parking spot in the busy city.
The hatchback was photographed on Google Street View parked next to a large plant pot, right on the edge of a busy thoroughfare.
It was a blatant attempt to disguise the street corner as a pint-sized parking spot.
The busy capital city of Belgium obviously isn’t an easy place to park in.
But the owner didn’t succeed, as the image ended up on Google Street View.
It was then tweeted from a Twitter account called Brussels Parking.
The owner of the account obviously wants to fix up the city’s problem with bad driving and parking, as the bio states: “To solve a problem this must first be recognised. To recognise it, it must first be known.”
Google Street View provides panoramic images of many thousands of streets across the globe, stitched together to create a seamless map.
The Google cars use clever photographic technology to take images with a 360-degree camera, which are then knitted together.
But when something in an image is moving, the effect can go wrong, as it did in Poland.
Canny Street View fans noticed that a group of runners in Park Cytadela were missing their feet.
Next to them, the missing limbs were visible, detached from their bodies.
Another of the 360 degree cameras captured a strange moment on a busy street in Washington.
Due to the speed a car was travelling at, the body of the vehicle seemed to disappear from view, with only the front and rear on show.
The result was a very cartoonish image of a car with just a bonnet and a boot.
Other times, people try to outwit the Google Street View cars by trying to immortalise themselves on camera.
One man in Victoria, Canada, was photographed on the side of the road wearing a horse head mask. He was sitting at a small dining table next to a vase of flowers, holding a banana beside some plastic flamingoes.
