Fully automated parking will come 'long before' autonomous driving

“Parking is a milestone in getting to fully automated driving,” says Bosch board member Dr Dirk Hoheisel. "And fully automated parking will come long before fully automated driving."

His company provides all manner of tech to all manner of carmakers, some of it the fancy parking assist features we already have. For a glimpse of the advances to come, then, Bosch HQ in Stuttgart is a pretty good place to visit.

So that’s exactly where we’ve gone. We’ve even tried some of it the tech out. So click through for a guide to the future of car parking. It’s more exciting than it sounds, promise…

Bosch’s founder, Robert Bosch, helped campaign for the eight-hour working day back in the 19^th century. It was designed to give his workers more time back, reducing their stress levels in the process. This technology should do the same, over 100 years on.

The idea is that cars with ultrasonic parking sensors - that’s rather a lot of new cars, nowadays - scan for parallel parking bays as they drive along, and feed the data back into a cloud, or ‘the Internet of Things’. Cars with access to this data will then be able to use their sat nav to direct drivers to empty spaces in cities.

In Germany, looking for spaces can account for 30 per cent of traffic in cities, with drivers travelling almost three miles as they drive about looking for somewhere to park. This can cost an additional £1 in fuel each time. That adds up to a lot of pints over time.

So-called ‘crowd intelligence’ could be combatting these stats by 2018, while the process will mate with automated driving in time.

Trials will begin in Stuttgart, using the 2,500 parking spaces of its tram system’s park-and-ride setup. But whole cities are next.

“We are talking to councils for permission to use their data to map out their cities,” says Bosch’s Dr Rolf Nicodemus. “It is in their interest to cut traffic.”

And yes, London is one of those cities. “We have been intensively discussing this with Transport for London,” Nicodemus confirms to TG. For anyone who has to park in central London, no matter how infrequently, it could be quite a breakthrough.

Perhaps even easier to map out, though, are car parks. Floor sensors at each space would feed data into a cloud. If you car had access to this, you could be guided into the empty spaces. No time-consuming journeys up and down multi-storeys as you search in vain for an empty bay.

But the real turning point is when legislation allows cars to drive themselves around the car park. The idea being you get out of your car in a drop-off area at the entrance, before it whisks itself off to a bay. It would then return itself to a collection area at the exit when you’re ready to go home again.

“It’s all about not starting your night out in a draughty car park,” Nicodemus tells us, with the authority of a man who hates a less than glamorous start to his evening.

The tech, we’re told, won’t ask of much investment from car parks themselves, while the technology behind automatically lifting motorway toll barriers will ensure your car doesn’t immediately cave in its front end upon entry.

Oh yes. The dream of life-size remote control cars is here. But before you start planning a car park-based destruction derby, hold your horses. The car finds its space and drives itself in unmanned, your mobile phone simply acting as a ‘dead man’s switch’ to ensure you’re still the one responsible.

TG tried it, both watching an unmanned Mercedes B-Class park itself from the outside, before sitting in the passenger seat as the little Merc steered us into an exceedingly tight space. It’s eerie to begin with, but the benefits are soon pretty obvious. Those moments you find a parking space too tight to open your doors in are eradicated: get out, let the car pop itself in the bay, and then summon it a few feet forward when you return.

You may wish to point out that the Tesla Model S and BMW 7-Series already offer such tech. But at the moment, many countries won’t let you actually use it until their legal system catches up. In time, as legislation keeps pace, the process will take place without a fleshy, old-fashioned driver in charge of things…

A branch of the tech in the previous slide, dubbed 'Home Zone park assist', can see your car pop itself on your drive, once you’ve taught it how to do it once. Again, we tried it, albeit with a parking bay rather than our own house. Because that isn’t in Stuttgart.

And it’s a doddle: press a button, park as you normally would, and the car will then remember the manoeuvre. Should a child or animal stray into your path, the car will avoid the obstacle and then return to its preordained route.

Superfluous tech? Perhaps. But if you have to negotiate a particularly tricky manoeuvre each night - climbing over a shallow kerb, perhaps, before swerving backwards around a lamppost one way then tucking tightly behind a wall in the other direction - this is yet more stress relieved from your day.

And as cars get bigger, this might be a way of accurately squeezing your car into the garage without having to worry about the small matter of extracting yourself from it.

The most tangible result of everything you’ve read about so far may not be the time you save, but the money you don’t have to spend fixing your duffed up car.

Bosch reckons parking is the cause of 40 per cent of all accidents with material damage, and having a car able to take over control of all of your low-speed manoeuvres ought to slash this considerably. That bank of parallel parking bays it has access to will be apportioned out by size, to make sure your car will actually fit.

And we had a little go in a BMW which Bosch had fitted with automatic braking technology. Below 10mph, it will stop the car dead if there’s an obstacle anywhere in its vicinity, even in its most oblique blind spots. That sets it apart from systems which currently only sense obstacles directly in front or behind.

With a big, square pillar as our obstacle, we approached it from all manner of unlikely angles, with no intention of braking ourselves. The car always stopped itself before impact. Once again, it’s a technology that utilises ultrasonic sensors many new cars already have.

“We don’t necessarily have to wait years for this technology to come to affordable cars,” Nicodemus says. “Many cars now already have the necessary ultrasonic sensors fitted to them.”

That means (fingers crossed) there shouldn’t be much of an additional cost, if any, for the customer to pay in order to have this kind of autonomous parking technology added. It’s all in the hands of the manufacturers how much they charge us.

This stuff is more likely to be offered as new technology on new cars, though, rather than being offered for retro fitment on currently owned ones. And as you may already suspect, the vast majority of autonomous parking features will require an automatic gearbox, unless the manufacturers themselves can summon up the tech to make a manual gearbox operate of its own accord…