If a Car Is Going to Self-Drive, It Might as Well Self-Park, Too

[cpzilliacus]

N.Y. Times: If a Car Is Going to Self-Drive, It Might as Well Self-Park, Too

TECHNOLOGY may soon render another skill superfluous: parking a car.

Sensors and software promise to free owners from parking angst, turning vehicles into robotic chauffeurs, dropping off drivers and then parking themselves, no human intervention required.

BMW demonstrated such technical prowess this month with a specially equipped BMW i3 at the International CES event. At a multilevel garage of the SLS Las Vegas hotel, a BMW engineer spoke into a Samsung Gear S smartwatch.

"BMW, go park yourself,"  and off the electric vehicle scurried to an empty parking spot, turning and backing itself perfectly into the open space. To retrieve the car, a tap on the watch and another command, "BMW, pick me up,"  returned the car to the engineer.

The i3 was equipped with laser scanners, including two mounted in the front right and left quarter panels. No G.P.S. was used. Instead, the car relied on a map of the parking garage and an onboard cellular data connection. No smartphone was needed. The Samsung watch includes its own cellular connection, so commands are sent to a BMW server, which then relays the instructions to the car, said Yves Pilat, one of BMW's engineers developing the feature. BMW calls it fully automated remote valet parking.

[formulanone]

Back in 2006, I played around with a Lexus LS 460 which could self-park. You put your foot on the brake pedal, pressed a special button on the dash, and "focused" the the desired limits on the nav screen to simulate where the car should go, over the image sent from the back-up camera. You kept your foot partially on the brake pedal all the while; pressing the pedal all the way down would stop the operation and lifting off the pedal would cancel the action entirely. The wheel would turn by itself, and it didn't hit anything thanks to the proximity sensors along the front and rear bumpers. Obviously, it didn't use cell data nor did anything using modern wireless tech.

Kind of neat, but it seemed more like of a show-off item to impress three other people in your luxobarge. After all, the process took much longer than actually parking the car with no added assistance. I hated showing clients how to use it, because the process took too long...that's something they should just read the book and figure it out for themselves since I wasn't the salesman.

[1995hoo]

Car and Driver once reviewed a car that could parallel park itself and they concluded that the system was too slow–they said by the time it could park the car, a more aggressive driver would swoop in and steal the space.