Mercedes-Benz Automates the Valet, and It Can Even Avoid Luddites Parking Themselves

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No matter when or where you need to do it, parking can easily be the most frustrating part of a day out. Valet parking might sound great but, well, we’ve seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off enough times that handing over the keys to a stranger raises the anxiety level, too. Autonomous-driving technology could very well be the solution. Such automation is exactly what Mercedes-Benz has demonstrated in the multi-story parking building at the automaker’s museum in Stuttgart, Germany.

To enable it, the driver would leave the vehicle on a valet-parking pad and turn over autonomous control of the vehicle to the automated valet by pressing a Park button on a smartphone app. The car is assigned a parking spot automatically and follows commands from the parking garage’s system to find it. When the owner is ready to return for the car, he or she can summon the vehicle back to an area adjacent to the valet-parking pad for a hassle-free exit.

What appears to set this system—a collaboration between Mercedes-Benz and supplier Bosch—apart from other efforts so far (is that it’s not just an automated parking-finder nor merely designed to move vehicles robotically or to file them away on a rack and retrieve them later. As the video below demonstrates, the car continues to respond to its own autonomous-driving system and safety features while en route to its assigned parking space and back to the exit. It can also maneuver around the Luddites still parking themselves and avoid potential mishaps with pedestrians finding their way to elevators or stairwells. Infrastructure implementation by Bosch employs sensors throughout the building to monitor parking availability.

The automaker and the tech supplier plan to do an “extensive trial” of the system after this week’s demonstration, followed by a commissioning phase. Then if licensing and certification are granted, the system will be available at the Mercedes-Benz Museum parking garage—to those with compatible vehicles, of course—beginning in 2018.

Not everyone wants to get aboard for a future that takes away the steering wheel and pedals, but this is one glimpse of the future that even Ferris, on second thought, would hand the keys over to.

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