Self Parking Vision by Volkswagen
Say goodbye to this eyesore…
Self parking is nothing new, luxury leaders such as Lexus and Mercedes have been working on these “parallel parking†designs for sometime now. But what is new, thanks to a breakthrough from the Volkswagen Self Parking Vision system, is self parking has now taken on a perpendicular role.
This means that with several cameras placed around a vehicle, followed by a current GPS unit, a driver could conceivably pull up to a restaurant, get out, push a button and the car will go and search out a spot in a parking garage, park itself, lock the doors, turn on its own alarm, then await its master to summon it to come back and pick him or her up.
While we are many years away from this arrangement, we are only a couple away from cars that will flawlessly park themselves in any situation, parallel or perpendicular, without the necessity for any driver involvement in the process.
Several years ago it was exciting that we could actually push a button to lock and unlock our doors, then we were able to push a button and start our car while drinking warm cocoa from our kitchen counter in the middle of winter. Today, Volkswagen is close to a breakthrough design of another button on our remotes that will tell the car to park itself in a designated spot we have chosen.
Using a high tech computer guidance system and ultrasound sensors and cameras in the side mirrors, the vehicle will guide and “self-correct†into a parking space (meaning if it starts at too drastic an angle it will pull forward and realign), shut off the engine, lock the doors, and all this is happening while the passengers are already headed to where they were going.
This would greatly reduce the number of small parking lot fender benders, and of course ensure that nobody in the History of the world will ever be able to parallel park again. We could also expect parking lots to reduce the spaces necessary in between each car, since we will no longer need to actually exit the vehicle once it is parked.
There you have it, two birds with one stone… now if we can just keep computers from devising a plot to take over the world, we would have it made!
May 27th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
[…] been received. Today we have cars that self-adjust to compensate for our driving habits, park themselves, and tell you when you’re driving […]
June 6th, 2008 at 11:29 pm
[…] been received. Today we have cars that self-adjust to compensate for our driving habits, park themselves, and tell you when you’re driving […]
January 12th, 2009 at 4:20 am
[…] is going to be an exciting year for technological innovation. It will have vehicles that can parallel park themselves, identify a driver by their “key”, and even more exciting, there are two safety features in the […]