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Yes, absolutely. Avoid all the parking chaos (i.e. people who don’t know/cant’t park their cars, signage, difficult layouts that are hard to follow, people fighting for spaces closer to the door) not to mention you also avoid parking lot dings and dents and all the safety concerns of walking around a carpark at midnight and this fixes them all. Its more space efficient too.
I know they’ve already had this in HK, Japan, and Taiwan for a few years. There are already quite a few vendors offering various solutions out there. I’m surprised it hasn’t started to make its way to the USA yet.
Considering the price of parking in places like NYC, I’m equally surprised this ended up in Budapest before the US. Of course, I suppose NYC has the issue of the subways underneath the city so digging to build the underground garage might not be as easy there.
I know this is in NYC…
It MIGHT be in Phila.. at one or two lots..
But generally..
God, I hope not.
I do try to find lots on my own in a garage.. n get my car into tight spots. I hate the stupid nanny tech in current Fords and Lexus LS’s offering cameras for morons who cant figure out how to parallel park..
But in the end, it might be cheaper to be operated by a machine of sorts, with no human error.. or people screwing with your vehicle.
I know the VW has a system for moving / selling cars like this.. in a giant tube. Smart does also.
P.S
Interesting how the E Class is a stripper..
I hadn’t even noticed the steelies until you mentioned it. Odd, you don’t see cars with LCD screens and steelies together often in the US. I can’t tell if it has leather or cloth from the quality of the video. Does Merc use real wood and the same interior materials in the stripper models it sells in Europe?
I guess you’d be shocked to see it with hubcaps in taxi livery… like the ones I saw in Frankfurt
I saw Smarts with steelies too, and a A5 without hubcaps.
Yes, this type of system is already deployed in the US.
http://www.automotionparking.com/company.php
Steelies are used for winter tires. Summer tires stay mounted on the Brabus Monoblock VI rims and the set are swapped on and off for summer.
Mercedes has always marketed their cars differently in the U.S. than the rest of the world. Here they are marketed only as luxury cars, the rest of the world more like mainstream. I can remember looking at my Dad’s Mercedes magazines (“In Aller Welt” if I remember correctly) in the mid 60’s seeing pictures of Mercedes taxi cabs, police cars and the like.
And Jalopnik posted it yesterday.
Well, so much for it being “the future” then…
Andrew Sullivan? Ick. Does he think Sarah Palin’s hiding Trig’s real birth certificate in there, too?
I don’t mean to get political; Sullivan just disgusts me, and I hate to see him getting linked to.
Yes…And he likely thinks Saddam stashed his WMD’s in there too. It’s hard to think of a blogger more loathed by both sides of the political aisle.
I toured a new high rise condo apartment building in San Francisco a few weeks ago, and they had a similar system to this. Up to 17 cars park through one access door… three levels and three deep. When an owner wants to retrieve their car, they enter their code and the platforms move around like a giant Rubik’s cube until their car is brought to the gate. Then the gate opens and they back out.
It’s not quite as sophisticated as the Budapest system in this video but it was pretty impressive to watch.
One problem is that it’s limited to 200 operations an hour. At rush hour in some places it would be a disaster. Boston’s Red Line Subway station at Alewife has capacity for 2700 cars. It’s a mess now, I can imagine what the wait would be like with that system.
In the winter, cars come in caked with salt soaked snow. How would that effect the mechanism over time? Then there is the problem of the snow melting off of the car during the day, dripping onto the mechanicals and refreezing in the evening when you go to pick up your car.
Exactly right! It would take TWO hours to empty a mere 400 cars.
How can people even put up with this. It’s too slow!
I know of two garages in NYC that have similar automated system, by two different companies. MCS – the pallet takes care of the muck and not sure if it shows it, the empty pallet at some point tilts to drain out the muck. There are pallet-less systems too for less hardware. It’s a great idea – your engine is not running once you get out, no fumes to exhaust, no dings, no large drive aisles…and no valet hoonalympics (why is my temp gauge in the middle if the car has been parked all day)
All I know is that when my car collection grows too big (I have one at the moment), and I’ve got excess wealth and paranoia, I’m hiding them in an automated underground bunker hidden under a single car garage.
Twingo – No, that won’t attract any attention…. LOL! (I’m with you on this).
This is nothin really new. I saw it in Japan nearly 10 years ago. In much smaller spaces, you drive along a lane, get out, the car and pallet slide laterally into the rotissary. Smart dealers in Europe had the cars on display in glass towers that the pallet could rotate to fill all four sides. Companies (OEM’s mostly) who have to do EPA emission testing store cars in such structures for temperature soak (i.e. get the car to a steady-state temp) prior to testing (and have for at least 20 years, see Ford Allen Park Test Lab, etc.)
BTW, I lost interest in the technology story somewhere after the pose-change between 1:24 and 1:25…
I’m sure there are versions with higher capacities and speeds that stage more cars. I like the idea!
Must have cost a fortune to build.
Things break. How does one get their car if this breaks? You don’t. Have to wait for it to be fixed. And it WILL break at some point.
The advantages are…
1) Nobody will mess with your car
2) Marginally (??) higher parking density
Disadvantages are
1) Kind of slow at rush hour
2) Has to be VERY expensive. You would need some very expensive land for the increased density to make up for this expense.
Probably not a viable solution in most areas. Also, could you imagine what a PITA it would be if you had to go grab something out of your car!?