Everybody Parks: Important Developments in Stationary Cars

Depending on which metropolis you call home, parking is anything from a major annoyance to a genuine source of hardship and strife. That is, unless you’re one of the lucky one-percenters who has so much money that other people’s ­problems aren’t really your problems. While most urban dwellers fret about finding an open parking space [see sidebar], even one far from their front doors, the rich are loath to leave their megadollar supercars in a garage or entrust them to a valet (whom they’ll have to tip, the cheapskates). Where there is need, there is someone to meet demand, and now some urban elite can ­simply ride in elevators—along with their cars—up to their apartments.

The “Sky Porch” parking units in Singapore’s Hamilton Scotts Apartments feature separate elevators for residents and their rides. A biometric thumb scanner identifies the owner and delivers his or her car to the appropriate garage. Even better, the garage shares a glass wall with the living room to allow for proper idolatry—er, admiration. The Hamilton Scotts has 54 units that include two-car garages; prices start around $7.5 million. Two of the building’s penthouse suites have four-car garages and price tags of around $24 million.

Near Miami, in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida, the Porsche Design Tower is slated to open in 2016. To the—ahem—basic idea of in-apartment parking, Porsche Design adds a bit of flair that moves it into the realm of sci-fi. As the vehicle approaches the elevator door, a robotic platform lifts driver and car off the ground, then places them in the glass-walled elevator, which rises through the building so everyone knows when they come and go. And, of course, what’s being driven. Prices for the Tower units are expected to range from $3 million to $9 million.

Wall Streeters who merely weekend in Singapore and/or Florida and need something for their permanent homes have options, too. In Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, 200 Eleventh Avenue offers New York’s first en-suite “Sky Garages” in 14 of its 16 residences. Owners pull into the stainless-steel elevator and are whisked from street level to the 300 square-foot garages attached to their two-story units in less than a minute. Prices start in the area of $6 million.

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• Instrumented Test: 2013 Porsche Panamera GTS
• Feature: The Well-Equipped Garage: Everything You Need to Create Yours
• Flexible Pens: What Car Designers Design When They’re Not Designing Cars

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A Spot for the Rest of Us

The desperate search for someplace convenient—not to mention legal—to temporarily abandon your car could soon be a thing of the past. TruCentive is a new project of the Nokia Research Center aimed at developing a reliable, real-time, crowd-sourced exchange of information about open parking spaces. It’s not the first time someone has tried to create such a service, but prior attempts have been stymied by a lack of reliability. TruCentive’s breakthrough is its system of incentives and rewards.

TruCentive issues credits to drivers for sharing the location of available parking spots. When a driver needs to park in a hurry, those credits can be used to purchase tips on available spaces. For greater usefulness, parkers can rate the quality of information shared and thus increase its credit value accordingly. That means people sharing the locations of parking spaces in urban areas such as Manhattan would receive greater rewards than those thumb-typing about spaces in less-busy suburbs. Users receive bonus credits when other drivers find parking using their information. The project is still in development with no official word on a public release, but keep an eye on your mobile device’s app store.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/caranddriver/blog/~3/4jykWrKsRQI/

Alan Dennis Kulwicki Travis Wade Kvapil Robert Allen Labonte Terrence Lee Labonte Randy Joseph Lajoie