No more parking your car
Instead of going to the parking garage and getting your car you take your smartphone out and tell your car to meet you at the front of the lobby.
Imagine getting out of your car and telling your car to park itself with your smartphone.
Ann Lien, Senior engineer at an electronics research lab for Audi of America in Belmont California gave us the scenario; you’re running late for an event, something that isn’t hard to imagine. As you’re coming out of your apartment, you call for your car on your smartphone. This is all doable in the future through Audi piloted parking.
Lien was head of an autonomous vehicle group in the 2007 urban DARPA challenge. She knows it’s not feasible to put a $70,000 sensor on the top of a car to try and make it automated or autonomous. But it is possible to set sensors and radars in a luxury car and the garage infrastructure so that the car can park itself and bring itself back down to the lobby. This not only saves time it saves gasoline. When a person is parking a car, they look for the closest parking space. When a car parks itself they don’t care where it parks or whether it is raining, they look for the first parking space. There is no getting in the car turning on the car and then answering a phone call and sitting there while the gasoline is being used. As soon as you tell your smartphone to tell your car to meet you at the lobby, it comes down and meets you in front of the lobby.
Audi spends 8 percent of its gross revenue on research and development. You would think it was technology or fear of litigation that was keeping this technology from coming out sooner, but according to Audi AG executives, it is legislation.
There are parking areas in Germany that will begin using piloted driving in 2013.
