The Volvo of the Future Will Drop You Off and Park All by Itself [w/Video]

We’ve heard a lot about autonomous driving in recent years, but how about autonomous parking? Volvo has given this a thought and is developing the technology that will make autonomous parking a reality in the future.

A Volvo V40 prototype fitted with the technology is able to find and park in a vacant space by itself, without the driver inside. Volvo says the driverless car interacts safely and smoothly with other cars and pedestrians in the car park.

“Autonomous Parking is a concept technology that relieves the driver of the time-consuming task of finding a vacant parking space. The driver just drops the vehicle off at the entrance to the car park and picks it up in the same place later,” explains Thomas Broberg, Senior Safety Advisor Volvo Car Group.

So how is this possible? The service is available where there are transmitters in the road infrastructure. In this case, the Vehicle 2 Infrastructure informs the driver that the car can park by itself. In order to activate the Autonomous Parking, the driver (or is that user?) only needs to use a mobile phone application.

The vehicle then uses sensors to localize and navigate to a free parking space, with the procedure being reversed when the driver comes back to pick up the car.

Volvo says the technology will arrive in production cars rather sooner than later, with an important step being the introduction of autonomous steering system in the second-generation XC90 SUV at the end of 2014.

You can see how Volvo’s Autonomous Parking system works in the videos below.

By Dan Mihalascu

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