It may not be flying cars or jet packs (just yet), but a garage in the United Kingdom is taking one of the headaches of the modern commute away. According to the BBC, a new garage will park your car for you.
How does it work, you ask.
At the new parking garage in Birmingham, drivers pull their car into a lift. Your car is then taken down to its level and put into its proper parking space. The system will even turn your car to fit properly into the space, according to the BBC’s report.
Called the Cube, the system is attached to an apartment complex and goes underground 65 ft. The system knows which car is yours and where to park it based on a keychain fob you swipe as you come into the garage.
Designed by Neil Edginton, the system is one of two in the world. Edginton says the system was necessary because of the depth of the parking garage and the desire to “not destroy all of the retail and restaurant frontages” in the area.
And what about the system forgetting where your car is? That’s not an issue, according to Andrew Smith, from WOHR Car Parking Systems, the German company behind the design.
“We can’t foresee how that would happen because each person in this system is a designated user, they have their own fob,” he says.
The BBC has a video of the automatic system in action HERE.
Very very cool, but does anyone else have a problem with a giant underground mechanical maze-box being called “The Cube”?
This isn’t new. It was done *years* ago.
Not as long as I don’t have to watch it. What a horrible movie.
The Cube is the building this is the car park for, mostly above ground. Look for The Cube (building) on Wikipedia, very odd looking thing. It’s hollow, and has open bits of some of the walls.
Alan.
They’ve had these kinds of parking garages for years in Japan. They were old news 11 years ago.