Why driverless parking faces long road to wide availability

Drive into the parking garage, get out of the vehicle and send it to a prebooked parking space just by tapping in a smartphone app.

Mercedes-Benz and Robert Bosch have turned what sounds like science fiction into reality at the at the Stuttgart Airport.

Now the fine print: It’s only available to people who own Mercedes S Class and EQS vehicles built since July 2022 that are equipped with the automaker’s Intelligent Park Pilot. The S Class starts at more than 107,000 euros in Germany, and the Intelligent Park Pilot adds an additional 3,272.50 euros to the price.

The high entry price is just one of the challenges automakers such as Mercedes and BMW and suppliers such as Bosch and Continental face as they seek to make a technology that has the potential to save time and millions in damages from accidents.

Those hurdles include convincing a vastly fragmented network of parking garage operators of the benefits of driverless parking as well as a host of potential headaches such as an unmanned car that is unable find a spot while its owner is already elsewhere.

Simplified parking payments

While available advanced self-parking technologies are so far limited to Mercedes and Bosch's system, which late last year was approved by the German government for commercial use by private cars, several other applications are also rolling out.

BMW and service provider Parkopedia have partnered on an in-vehicle feature that enables drivers to pay for parking in Germany and Austria via their infotainment systems or the My BMW App.

Parkopedia’s platform connects vehicle sensors with the infrastructure at payable parking locations, whereby the vehicle will display the payment function and ask the driver to confirm payment before leaving the vehicle.

If the parking zone allows billing by the minute, the parking transaction automatically ends as soon as the driver leaves the parking location.

Jannik Muenk, product owner, connected parking for BMW Group, said parking is a top pain point for vehicle owners, and in Parkopedia, which also works with Apple, Audi, Ford and Volkswagen, it found a partner that could provide an acceptable level of coverage.

"The parking market is very fractured," Muenk said. "We face the same problem as many players in the market. We can't just interact with one provider because that would give us too little coverage for our customers. But we also can't interact with all of them because it's simply too many to integrate them all into our ecosystem."

Gartner analyst Pedro Pacheco said that overcoming this dilemma will be crucial.

"BMW and other automakers have tried this before, and the point where it always failed is the aspect of coverage," he said.

Pacheco says that if an automaker wants to provide a certain service to a driver, but the driver cannot regularly and dependably use that service it becomes irrelevant. "The automakers need someone that no matter where you go, most of the parking lots are covered."

Muenk said BMW’s plans to expand the service are contingent on reaching an acceptable level of coverage, which is dependent on Parkopedia's apply to widen its ecosystem.

"They are working at high speed to expand the coverage," he says. "I'm quite confident we will roll out in a couple of new markets this year and also next year."

Cars that park themselves

The challenges of achieving widespread availability of fully autonomous parking are even more daunting than creating a reliable payment system, although encouraging progress is being made.

Continental offers two approaches to automated valet parking (AVP). Type 1 focuses on an intelligent vehicle and Type 2 is based around intelligent infrastructure.

"Both types are valuable and satisfy different needs from the markets," Continental's product manager for automated valet parking, Saman Khodaverdian, said in an email reply to questions. "In the long term, we believe that a combination of the intelligent vehicle with the intelligent garage will prevail since both vehicles and garages are getting smarter."

Therefore, Continental plans to work on both approaches to provide a full spectrum of AVP solutions.

"What all of them have in common is that they bring more comfort and safety to drivers and take over stressful parking maneuvers for them," he said. "At the same time, the systems reduce small accidents that can be quite expensive."

Milestone achievement

In coordination with the Apoca Parking Group, which runs the P6 parking garage at Stuttgart Airport, Mercedes and Bosch are offering Level 4 autonomous parking.

That means S-Class and EQS owners with the Intelligent Park Pilot feature can use Apoca's digital mobility platform to make parking reservations, contactless entry and exit, and cashless payment.

The driver leaves the vehicle in a predetermined drop-off area and can send it to the pre-booked space through the smartphone app.

The car links up with Bosch-installed technology in the structure to guide the vehicle to the parking spot, up ramps if necessary, and determining if the path ahead is clear. Car owners can also retrieve the vehicle using the app.

To expand the offering, more parking garages with the necessary infrastructure technology will have to be outfitted by Bosch, a Mercedes press release said.

A move in that direction happened this week with the announcement that Bosch and Apcoa will install the technology in 15 more parking garages in Germany starting this year. As a first step, Bosch and Apcoa are planning to make up to four parking spaces per parking garage ready for AVP.

Bosch and Apcoa's goal is to equip several hundred parking garages across the globe with automated valet parking in the coming years.

"Germany is only the beginning," Bosch's Claudia Barthle, who heads up global software and service sales in the cross-domain computing solutions division, said in a release. "We are expecting to soon be able to gradually roll out automated valet parking in other countries."

Apcoa manages approximately 1.8 million individual parking spaces at more than 12,000 locations in 13 European countries.

Potential stumbling block

Gartner’s Pacheco said any successful expansion of the autonomous parking will depend on the willingness of parking garage operators to install -- or approve the installation of -- the hardware required to enable autonomous parking.

"The motivation from the side of the parking lot operator to enable automated parking is already shaky," he said. "Installing that infrastructure is what allows the vehicle to attain that Level 4 capability. I'm sure in the Stuttgart airport case, Mercedes and Bosch are covering most of the bill, but as costs escalate, that's where the problem starts."

He said that given the small number of vehicles with the capability, many garage owners will ask themselves: How much business will this generate?

He predicted they will also worry about a wide range of human-caused issues.

"As we see often, not everyone parks in a tremendously civilized way," he said. "Let's imagine you are at the airport and there is only one spot free. Maybe the driver in the adjacent 'open spot' has parked like a jerk and has taken part of the other space. What is it the autonomous cars going to do?"