Concierge parking is a
luxury that few of us indulge in. It can be expensive, and there's always the
thought that the young guys driving your car will have a lead foot when you're
out of sight. However, if your car could go and find a parking space on its own,
we would all be over the moon.
It seems that the luxury of
concierge parking for free is on its way. In this year's Combined Exhibition
for Advanced Technologies in Japan, Nissan have shown a vehicle, the NSC-2015,
which will do precisely that (1,2). The robotic system installed in the car
enables it to rush off to find a parking spot after you have got out and told it to
go park itself.
The cameras and sensors in
the car enable it to find a vacant parking slot and it will reverse itself into
the spot. With 4G technology it has keeps track of where you are every minute
that you’re away from it, so when you are ready, a button on your smart phone
will bring it rushing to your side like a whistle to an obedient dog.
Your faithful robotic car
doesn't sleep. It keeps a watchful eye open for bad guys getting too close. If
they try and interfere with it, it will tell your smartphone which will warn
you of impending doom. You could call the police, rush to its aid, or best,
tell it to come and find you. Unfortunately, at present this is only a demo
version and we will have to wait for a while before our parking problems have vanished.
The engineers seem to think
that robotic control of our cars is a long way off. The auto-drive Google car
has quite a few miles under his drive train and the laws are being changed to
make it legal for general use. The BBC report suggests suggest that auto-drive
vehicles may be popular in urban settings but less so on the interstate. It
seems to me that long journeys on the interstate would be a good place to set
the auto-drive function, just as we use cruise control today.
I hope we get our auto-drive
and concierge parking electric cars very, very soon. I'm feeding my piggy bank
so I'm ready.
- http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelkanellos/2012/10/03/nissans-robot-car-finds-its-own-parking-spots/
- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19829906
