Very High Tech - Elevator Garages in an NYC Hi-Rise

theodp writes "If the hassle of getting groceries from the parking garage to your 12th floor condo has been holding you back from buying a deluxe apartment in the sky, wait no more. Wired reports on the En-Suite Sky Garages at 200 Eleventh Avenue (Flash) in Chelsea, where an 8,000-pound-capacity freight elevator will whisk your Bentley directly into your pad. The convenience doesn't come cheap — a garage-equipped 2BR starts at $4.7M."

Re:Elevator Garage?

[jdhutchins]

Units, units my friend. While watts is a unit of power, it is not a unit of energy- you probably meant to think kilowatt-hours.

Your equation for energy required to lift a car was wrong- regardless of the units you put on the end, Work = F*distance, not F*time (which is change in momentum)

Your calculations *should* have been:

Work required to lift a 1000kg car 50 meters: W = mg(deltaH) = 1000 * 9.8 * 50 = 490kJ
Work required to lift your car every day for a year: 178.85MJ

In more familiar units, since 1 kWh = 3 600 000 J,
Energy required to lift the car: 0.1361 kWh
Energy required to lift your car per year: 49.68 kWh
Energy required for 100 units: 4.97MHh

America discovers car elevators...

[LanceUppercut]

How long these have been in use in Europe? Thirty years? Twenty five? Even in Russia nobody looks at car elevators as something unusual...

It's been done

[Animats]

This isn't the first. There's at least one apartment building in Dubai with a similar setup. There's CarLoft [carloft.de] in Germany. There's one on Charlotte, NC. It's even been done in New York before; there was a writeup in Elevator World.

Re:Cheaper than parking on the street

[Tom]

Public transportation you say?

Is an option if you live near the station, but only then. Public transport has, unfortunately, been all but demolished in many parts of Europe. The German government, for example, is currently busy selling 50% of the train system - estimated worth: 100 billion Euros. Ask price for half of that: 6 billion Euros. If that isn't a fire-sale, I don't know what is. We'll probably find a good part of that government with lucrative positions in certain corporations once their careers are over.

Why do I mention this? Because it's been going on for about 10 years, and all those years train service in Germany has gone down. Remember when the Germans were famous for being punctual? One thing Germany was famous for was how its trains ran on the minute. If it said 8:52 on the time table, it would be there at 8:52 and not 8:53 (or somewhere between 8:45 and 9:00, like almost everywhere else). Those times are over. Train delays have become so common that they're a running gag.