The Volvo that can park itself

Imagine pulling up outside an airport and heading for the check-in desk while your car goes off to park itself.

It will send a message to your smartphone once safely tucked in a bay, and come to pick you up on your return - all without a driver on board.

Science fiction? No. Volvo is already demonstrating an autonomous parking system in a V40, and is serious about having it in a production car before the end of this decade. And Volvo is not alone. Audi demonstrated a similar idea at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas at the start of the year.

The prototype self-parking V40 is even smart enough to recognise when another car pulls out into its path, or if a trolley-wielding pedestrian has stepped out in front of it, and come to a gentle stop.

It works through a highly sensitive camera with advanced exposure control and a radar sensor which will form the basis of other Volvo safety advances in next year's new XC90.

"Customers will soon be ready to embrace autonomy in cars and pay for it," says the senior technical leader for Volvo safety technologies, Erik Coelingh.

But while autonomous parking can be made to work, there are a couple of major issues to resolve before it is ready to be offered to customers. The first is that it can only work if the car is able to recognise vacant parking spaces, so a vehicle-to-infrastructure link has to exist. "The one piece of vital information is 'is there a parking space available'," says Coelingh.

The second obstacle to commercialisation is that, under current legislation almost everywhere in the world, totally self-driving cars are not allowed. The car which parks itself would be legal only in private parking areas.

But when up to a third of all people who drive in cities are just looking for somewhere to park - wasting time and fuel adding to their stress levels - Volvo believes it is only a matter of time before legislation catches up with technology and lets the car take the strain.

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