Have you ever driven in New York City? It’s an experience you won’t soon forget. Have you ever tried parking your car in New York City? That’s also an experience one never forgets. The times I’ve been forced to park in the city I tend to walk away wondering if my car will be there when I return. I could pay someone else to deal with my vehicle, but I have visions of the scene from “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” where two parking attendants take Cameron’s dad’s Ferrari on a joy ride (not that I own a Ferrari)…
If you have trust issues with parking attendants you may consider having a robot park your car. If you visit New York’s Chinatown next week you’ll be able experience first-hand what I am referring to. In just a few days the city’s public robotic garage (only the third of its kind in the United States) will open its doors and let technology do the parking. Don’t worry a humanoid robot valet won’t be taking over the wheel of your vehicle. Instead, advanced technology will allow the Chinatown garage to squeeze (I mean accommodate) 67 cars in an apartment-building basement that would otherwise fit only 24—and the garage does all the parking itself.
Here’s how: You pull your car into the garage, stop on a pallet and get out. The pallet is then lowered into the garage below, and transported to a vacant parking space by a computer-controlled contraption similar to an elevator that also runs sideways. The cost of this “Jetsons”-like park job is about $400 monthly or $25 per day.
The system sounds wonderful, another one of its kind does have somewhat of a checkered past. According to city records, two years ago a robotic garage in New Jersey “dropped an unoccupied Cadillac Deville six floors and a Jeep four stories.”
The owner of the new robotic garage in Chinatown told news reporters that drivers shouldn’t worry about leaving their cars at his place: “It is a complete virtual impossibility that damage can occur,” he said.
He added that service is his company’s top priority. And talk about service… when you come back to retrieve your car, the underground system goes into motion (because it parks cars two deep in some slots, it sometimes needs to shuffle cars around to retrieve others) all with the touch of a single button. What’s more, an underground turntable turns the car around before it’s lifted to the surface, ensuring that it’s returned facing out into the driveway, so you don’t have to reverse out of the garage.
Hmmm… maybe I will have to work through my parking lot issues and give this one a try. How about you?
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