The huge impact driverless cars will have on parking and urban landscapes

Vallie’s most common existential question from investors & supporters is “What happens to your business when there are driverless cars?”. Don’t worry — there’s a plan and a world of possibility.

Elon Musk predicts that fully autonomous cars will hit the road by 2023. Governments and car manufacturers around the world are trying to figure out how safe the new driverless cars are going to be, and how they should be regulated. Being in the business of on-demand parking, we’re asking ourselves another question — how and where are they going to be parked?

But first, back to the present. The average car is parked 95% of the time, with only 5% on-the-road time. An IBM survey reported that worldwide, urban drivers spend an average of 20 minutes per trip looking for parking, and a University of California study found that the United States has somewhere close to a billion parking spots. Since there are only 253 million passenger cars and light trucks in the US, that means there are roughly four times more parking spaces than vehicles.

As driverless technology continues to improve, so does parking. In the next five to ten years, parking as we know it will be completely redefined just as cars will be.

Without the need for drivers, cars can be managed by robots in high efficiency spaces that aren’t a blight on the urban landscape, and don’t require customer stairs, elevators and wide alleyways to allow access to cars.

These new car parks can also offer refuelling, maintenance and other car services. Considering how much of our current city space is taken up with large car parks, all these developments could be transformative, akin to when we “horseless carriages” replaced cars, and mews were one by one renovated into prime residential and commercial spaces. Here are a few ways that we think parking will evolve…

Car parks will become the new gas stations

As electric cars become the primary mode of lightweight vehicle transportation in cities, recharging points will be in greater demand. Commercial car parks and London councils are already offering charging points for electric vehicles, while US on-demand parking startup Luxe, has recently announced a partnership with Tesla, so that Tesla consumers’ vehicles can be recharged while they are parked.

When there are hundreds of thousands, even millions of electric vehicles entering the city, there will also be many thousands of charging points to keep them ‘fuelled’ with power. Most of these charging points will be inside car parks, not on the street. In fact, on-street parking may become a thing of the past entirely in the age of driverless cars.

Driverless cars will park during off-peak times

For efficiency’s sake, driverless cars will park in car parks during off-peak times. They won’t be driving about in anticipation of work, and they will know where and when is most efficient for them to be stationary. They will also need to park to recharge. The questions of where to park will be determined by the duration of parking required, price points and local availability, and allocation will be handled by software that has high level visibility on space and can take decisions and make assignments to autonomous vehicles in real time with little to no human involvement. Think robot car parks, silently and efficiently managing the storage of self-driving cars.

Car parks will become logistics hubs — new shipping ports for the on-demand economy

Right now, car parks are just places for people to park their cars because members of the public have access to them, and adding other facilities would be problematic. It’s not safe to run other businesses in car parks, when you have a range of people driving around. In the era of the driverless car, many of the cars will be delivery vehicles and only autonomous vehicles will have access to certain car parks. Car parks can then be like shipping ports where delivery vehicles can pull into them to load and unload goods. This also means that future car parks can be a lot more efficient with space, because people won’t need to get in and out of cars. Some predict that 15 years from now, autonomous vehicles will have erased the need for up to 90 % of our current lots. Last year, Audi launched an automated parking garage for self-driving cars near Boston, “where space for vehicles would be reduced by two square meters per car, with driving lanes becoming narrower, and staircases and elevators no longer needed.”

Car parks will be connected environments with embedded and networked devices

As car parks accommodate driverless electric vehicles and become logistics hubs, they will need to modernize to become connected environments with internet access and embedded devices, and even other autonomous robots. These devices and robots (think the Entrance Barrier and Ticket Machines of the future) will react to requests by the vehicles entering and the businesses that run those vehicles. Imagine a future where driverless cars enter a car park, drive directly to a vacant charging point and have their cargo unloaded and refilled by autonomous robots. On-spot robots will also carry out lightweight maintenance and cleaning services. Right now, you can’t even get mobile reception in most car parks so think how different the car par of the future will be.

Cities will have fewer car parks and more green spaces

The self-driving car will change driving patterns. Currently there are two theories as to how people will use self-driving cars; as “autovots” — where cars will pick up individual passengers sequentially with high individual ownership rates, or “taxibots”, where a fleet of cars will be shared by several passengers. In either scenario, the efficiency and availability of driverless cars will decrease individual car ownership, reduce the number of cars on the road and reduce the need for city parking. This scenario could free up a lot of precious urban property, which could mean greener cities and revitalized suburbs as longer commutes become more palatable.

From Now Until Then

So how do we go from on-demand parking apps to interconnected smart car parks operated by artificial intelligence? Well, we can’t predict everything in the future, but at Vallie, we are working on developing APIs for parking self-driving cars and we are using latest technologies to explore car management and storage using interconnected spaces in the future. One thing is certain — car parks are about to get awesome.