As mentioned in an article yesterday, it’s a hassle finding a good parking space. And once you find that spot, will your rusty skills from driver’s ed class to get you smoothly into the space?
Audi unveiled its new self-driving car technology at CES this week. The new Audi system can self-drive, look for a parking space in a garage, and park safely without a driver.
The technology goes well beyond today’s assisted parking systems. Using a variety of ultrasound and laser sensors placed in the car, the garage and the roads, the Audi actually parks itself in a without a driver.
Let’s say you want to stop by a shopping mall. You simply pull up outside the garage, open the door, get out and push a button on the key fob or your iPhone. The system then selects Drive and inches into the garage all by itself. When you want to pick up your car, simply push the same button and it comes to get you.
Of course, to make this possible garages need a central computer system that connects to the car via WLAN and transmits a schematic map of the route to follow.
Audi recently announced that it has become the first automaker granted a license from the state of Nevada to test the self-parking technology on the streets. Currently Google holds this license for testing its driverless car in Nevada. Audi engineers estimate that we could see this technology within a decade.
The video below shows a working demo of the self-parking Audi in the garage of the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Las Vegas. The self-parking Audi reminds me of KITT from the TV Series “Knight Rider”. Although if one of these got loose, maybe it would be more like the supernatural killer car in Stephen King’s “Christine”.