A German Parking Garage Parks Your Car For You

moon_unit2 writes "Tech Review has a story about a garage in Ingolstadt, Germany, where the cars park themselves. The garage is an experiment set up by Audi to explore ways that autonomous technology might practically be introduced; most of the sensor technology is built into the garage and relayed to the cars rather than inside the cars themselves. It seems that carmakers see the technology progressing in a slightly different way to Google, with its fleet of self-driving Prius. From the piece: 'It's actually going to take a while before you get a really, fully autonomous car,' says Annie Lien, a senior engineer at the Electronics Research Lab, a shared facility for Audi, Volkswagen, and other Volkswagen Group brands in Belmont, California, near Silicon Valley. 'People are surprised when I tell them that you're not going to get a car that drives you from A to B, or door to door, in the next 10 years.'"

Self Parking isn't new

[Anonymous Coward]

wikipedia says: [wikipedia.org]

The earliest use of an APS was in Paris, France in 1905 at the Garage Rue de Ponthieu.[2] The APS consisted of a groundbreaking[2] multi-story concrete structure with an internal elevator to transport cars to upper levels where attendants parked the cars.[3]

In the 1920s, a Ferris wheel-like APS (for cars rather than people) called a paternoster system became popular as it could park eight cars in the ground space normally used for parking two cars.[3] Mechanically simple with a small footprint, the paternoster was easy to use in many places, including inside buildings. At the same time, Kent Automatic Garages was installing APS with capacities exceeding more than a 1,000 cars.

APS saw a spurt of interest in the U.S. in the late 1940s and 1950s with the Bowser, Pigeon Hole and Roto Park systems.[2] In 1957, 74 Bowser, Pigeon Hole systems were installed,[2] and some of these systems remain in operation. However, interest in APS in the U.S. waned due to frequent mechanical problems and long waiting times for patrons to retrieve their cars.[4] Interest in APS in the U.S. was renewed in the 1990s, and there are 25 major current and planned APS projects (representing nearly 6,000 parking spaces) in 2012.[5]

While interest in the APS in the U.S. languished until the 1990s,[2] Europe, Asia and Central America had been installing more technically advanced APS since the 1970s.[3] In the early 1990s, nearly 40,000 parking spaces were being built annually using the paternoster APS in Japan.[3] In 2012, there are an estimated 1.6 million APS parking spaces in Japan.[2]

The ever-increasing scarcity of available urban land (urbanization) and increase of the number of cars in use (motorization) have combined with sustainability and other quality-of-life issues[2][6] to renew interest in APS as alternatives to multi-story parking garages, on-street parking and parking lots.[2]

Another article is here. [wikipedia.org]

Re:Sheesh

[lennier1]

The topic probably would've made more sense if the bullshit summary had actually contained a video of the experimental system: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfgn6evkMpw [youtube.com]