We have a small townhome in a very urban area. Our "backyard" is 15 feet wide (the width of our townhouse) and 30 feet deep. Right now, the backyard is brick pavers for the first 10 feet off the back of the house, and then 20 feet of concrete parking pad. We are currently renovating our home, and will be building a new deck immediately off the back of the house where the brick pavers currently are. The deck will be approximately 2 feet off the ground (level with the sliding doors on the back of the house). We could leave the parking pad as is -- but we have a 3 year old busy boy and are debating tearing out the concrete and putting in artificial turf on that area instead (i.e. artificial turn running from the edge of the deck to the rear of the backyard). We'd tear out the concrete so that the turf is softer for playing. I also like the idea of better drainage, plus we have backyard parties a lot and artificial grass would essentially double the landscaped usable space in our yard for guests.

Before anyone suggests real grass, it's not viable in the city - it would be dead mud in two weeks.

So the catch is that most days we would still have our car parked back there. We live in a very busy urban area where parking is unreliable, so we need off street parking. But the reality is that we almost never use our car -- maybe once a week at most, but often it sits for weeks without being used. I'm envisioning that we'd move the car out to the street for a lot of weekends so we could just let our son play in the yard. Or move the car whenever we have a party.

I have googled a bit and see that some artificial turf is advertised as tough enough for cars to drive on. But then i've read some posters say that regular driving would likely destroy it. We are somewhere in the middle - very infrequent "driving" on it, but near constant weight of a car.

I should also add that the alley behind our house is extremely tight so it wouldn't be of any benefit to put in a run of pavers where the car tires would go -- because we have to swing the nose of car as we pull in. So there is no way to just do a straight run into the parking space.

Does anyone have any experience with artificial turf and cars/driving/parking? Or any thoughts on this generally?