Parking? Child’s play!

On the subject of parking, disparate divisions are working together for the first time to provide digital services for new customer segments, and involving these customers from the development stage. One of these services is “connected parking,” which aims to relieve the burden on drivers, cities, and the environment before the end of the decade. To quote Jürgen Auracher, the head of sales and marketing for connected parking: “Parking and the technical solutions tied up with it play a huge role when it comes to making life pleasant in growing cities.” Presently, Bosch is developing and testing two products in parallel, all of them aimed at tackling the major challenges posed by parking.

Curbside parking is a rarity in big cities. That’s not to say it doesn’t exist, it can just be hard to find. In community-based parking (CBP), vehicles take care of this task themselves. As they drive past, they register the coveted vacant spaces and send this data via the automaker to the Bosch IoT Cloud. There, the data is processed and forwarded to vehicles that are on the lookout for a parking space. This eliminates much of the nerve-wracking and polluting search for somewhere to park, as drivers can go directly to a free space. “Out of a million vehicles in Germany, 100,000 are already fitted with the technical equipment required for this service to work, above all ultrasonic sensors and internet connectivity,” says Manuel Maier, who is responsible for this product.

Within defined areas, parking will soon no longer need a driver at all. In automated valet parking, cameras installed in parking garages thoroughly map the surroundings and any possible obstacles. Data collected in this manner is transmitted in real time via a server to the vehicle, which maneuvers as though driven by unseen hands, avoiding obstacles, and inserts itself into a parking space. The process is initiated by smartphone at the entrance to the parking garage. Drivers are notified where their vehicles are parked, and can later summon them to the pick-up point again – much in the same way that they arranged for them to park in the first place. “No more long distances to walk, no long waiting times,” says the product owner Gerrit Quast.