Self-Parking Car Available In Japan

sinjayde writes "Yahoo!/Reuters is reporting that Toyota has released a car for sale in Japan that is able to park itself: 'Toyota's new hybrid gasoline-electric Prius sedan uses electrically operated power steering and sensors that help guide the car when reversing into parking spaces.'" No need to rely on the reverse parking formula anymore?

A dumb question

[AnimeFreak]

Would you get a "fail" if you used this feature during your driving examination? I managed to pass it, but for those who cannot seem to master parallel parking, this must be a boon.

Who pays?

[moehoward]

Will your insurance company pick it up if you (I mean it) damages another car?

In the US, these have to pass some rigorous gov't inspection and testing before they are allowed on the road. I don't think I want the liability.

Is parking really that hard? Are people really that stupid and lazy? Don't answer that. Can I get a robot to feed me my cereal in the morning?

Good for Toyota

[Ugodown]

I have been impressed with Toyota's tack record in terms of innovation. Energy friendly cars were just the beginning, now integrating technology like this into cars will really make them sell. A far cry from what is being done with American and European cars (exept for the energy part).

Re:Who pays?

[EvilTwinSkippy]

The way liability insurance is structured, you pay regardless. Anyone, and by logical extension, anything you grant control of the car is covered by your policy.

I don't think you will have the option of recovering damages from the manufacturer. You ultimately pulled the switch that told the car to auto-park.

Not new

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not new. I've seen a similar system nearly 12 years ago used by a handicapped photographer at my high school. His car was retrofitted with a very similar system that would park the car by itself.

I can't say I...

[bob670]

really enjoy driving anymore as it is, and with most major metros (and smaller metros as well) experiencing some level of gridlock, I drive as little as possible in areas where this would be of any real use. I know we are talking about a car company, but I would rather see this kind of effort go in to public transportation/mass transit.

The forgotten danger

[menscher]

When backing into a space, your front end swings out a bit. So you have to watch for traffic approaching from behind before you do this. Does the car think to do that? No? Whoops.

Wrong place for intelligence

[El]

What we need is a car that watches the driver, and says things link "You're drunk! I'm NOT starting!" and "Hang up the cellphone and pay attention to your driving!"

highways and magnets

[doormat]

The freeway you're talking about is Interstate 15 near San Diego, CA. They built a single lane, multi-mile segment on the inside median, with magnets under the road every 100'. The car would be programed to follow the magnets and make course corrections. There were also ultrasonic sensors on the front and back. The demo had 3 cars at 100mph, 10' apart with the system engaged.

Re:dependency

[Gogl]

And here's the irony: I agree with you that the only possible justified use of these sorts of driving-aid devices would be to help old people (although maybe I'm just callous because I generally think that if they're too old to drive they just shouldn't be driving), but only the young people will be willing to use them. Hell, I'm not even that old and I wouldn't trust some sort of auto-parking thing. Only people who are young when it comes out and grow up with it will be used to it and willing to use it themselves.

I bet it was the same thing with automatic transmission at first. A car changing gears on it's own, many of the people who were only used to manual probably didn't particularly want to make the switch. Some will switch, but the vast majority of the transition depends on time.

Or to make a long story short, new technology can take upwards of a generation to really assimilate into society. But you probably knew that anyway, I just felt like pointing that out as it seemed pertinent or something.

Re:Who pays?

[wonton_mein]

The car is being sold in Japan, not the U.S. I agree in order to sell in the U.S., it must pass lots of inspections and testings. In hindsight, a reserved parking space in cities like Tokyo and Hong Kong can easily exceed that of insurance premiums, so lots of car owners resort to parking on the cheaper/metered parking spaces located on the streets. So a self-parking car can actually save them money (assuming the drivers have mediocre parallel-parking skill). Imagine waiting on a mediocre driver who's attempting to manually parallel park, on a busy street in Tokyo. Multiply that by N.

how great an idea that would be.

[YllabianBitPipe]

come up with a way to put gps devices in parking meters that kick in when the space is empty. then anyone in a car with a gps unit can see where they are.

Glad to see they put this in a hybird car.

[ModernGeek]

I love the Hybrid car philosophy, it is a step away from gas-guzzling SUV's. This is a great incentive for people to buy a Prius over another car too, and the body on the new models look alot better than the older ones. My friends dad has a Prius, and it drives fast, and it rides ALOT more smooth than a traditional car. I just don't know why this idea was never embrassed before. Also, how come we don't have cars that can drive themself on the interstate? It doesn't seem like it would be hard at all, since they could just implement sensors into an interstate quite simply since it is all managed by the government, an open standard could be created by the Govt, and all the car companies could follow.

why?

[ShadowRage]

Why are we encouraging laziness? bad enough people already can barely drive, so why make it easier for them to be better screw ups, stop microsoftizing everything people, because if the technology fails, what are people gonna do? Like one dude said, market these to people who honestly need the technology (eg, semi-paralyzed people, older folks, etc) Stop giving people an excuse for being dumbasses.

Re:How stunt drivers do it

[sanx]

I believe the world record for parking in a space using this method was done by a British stunt driver (forget his name) who managed to handbrake into a space 17cm longer than the car itself and stop with both wheels within 10cm of the kerb. It took his about four tries to do this.

The stunt driver in question made his name doing the same stunt in TV ads for the Austin Montego car - a car so truly f'ing awful that it deserved to be confined to the great car crusher in the sky upon launch.

I saw this today

[abhisarda]

on the NHK channel(Japanese TV, nhk.or.jp). It is actually a very spiffy car. It looks sleek and more like a mini-minivan than the regular Prius. Also, this model was black in color.
In the demonstration the man driving the Prius stopped the car a little ahead of a parking spot, then on the LCD screen, pressed the left & right buttons(Im guessing, cuz it was in japanese and too small to read) and then the car parked itself right on the spot intended. The driver at that time was "look ma, no hands". There were front and rear cameras and while parking the car was emitting a sound similar to the "put seatbelt on" one.

Re:driving test.

[cfallin]

In some states, it is no longer a requirement to know how to parallel park

True in Oregon - it's been replaced by parking and then backing along a curb (at least that's what my driving instructor said - I'm not 16 yet and so haven't taken the test).

Re:highways and magnets

[drinkypoo]

That's a prototype, a solution which they could implement THEN. NOW, by using radio triangulation (GPS? Or more easily, something more local. RFID?) :) and inertial tracking (MEMS Accelerometers?) you could somewhat trivially design a car that drives itself, as long as all the other cars used the same system, which is to say they would respect the lanes of traffic, and not run into one another.

The only problem then becomes crap-in-the-road (or lack of a road) avoidance. However if you had traffic monitoring statistics collection and-or mesh-networked sharing of data (it's okay to be a star network) then cars can individually detect something in the road that they should not run over, or the fact that the road has been damaged, by using radar or sonar, and handle the situation. This will not work without ABS and is best-implemented using all wheel drive.

In fact, I just had a really great idea which I am an idiot to share unless I narrowly provide a "prior art" style musing that defeats some asinine patent; put RFID tags in all the road paint, on all the reflectors, etc. End up with an RFID tag every square inch or so in paint. Now use vehicles that drive along and scan them periodically. This will tell you everything you need to know about road geometry.

Obviously every road doesn't need this technology, just interstate highways. Then everyone's cars can go as fast as they want them to go (within reason) and they can cooperate on methods to do this.

I realize that I'm oversimplifying things a lot, and it would be easy and reasonable for any of you to say "Well then go do it and shut the fuck up" but come on, all of these are solved problems. You might not be able to do it economically today, but you certainly could do it, and make it safer than counting on people, who are unreliable. Sure a person might be able to make a judgement call like "I don't need to slow down to go around this dead dog, just go a foot onto the shoulder" and a car says "holy shit to go around this large thing I'd have to go onto the shoulder and I have no idea if that's safe!" So the car is going to nail the brakes (don't worry, it's ABS) and maybe even downshift a few times (if you got a tiptronic or similar) and pester you to go around it manually. This is a problem because your car can probably brake a lot faster than a person can, unless the person is in a car with better brakes, and is really on the ball, so this is why it's so important for ALL cars allowed on these roads to have the system. It's really not because we're afraid that the cars will do something wrong, you can solve that by making them slow down and/or stop rather than do something questionable. Take the unpredictable humans out of the equation and bang, you're done.

Of course, it might well be more intelligent to replace the freeways with some kind of trains, which cars are attached to. Maybe they could even switch cargoes while in motion, but that's unnecessary. Some kind of routing system (we all like dynamic routing) could handle the problem neatly. You'd pay less for travel when the queues were empty, of course. I personally think that this might be the best model. Maintain the interstates where they are major business corridors, which is to say that they're used all day, but pare them down some, and put all the long range traffic on trains.

Since that will never happen, let's start with the RFID tags in the roads. Anyone want to give me a big lump of capital? :)

Re:It had to be done...

[danila]

Unfortunately, in [Soviet] Russia the number of cars skyrocketed after the collapse of the USSR. This coincided with the unwillingness of Russians to pay parking tickets, which gave rise to parking in places where parking is illegal. The authorities tried a countermeasure - arresting a car and placing it in custody, but the courts ruled out that it's illegal (in Russia you can't deprive anyone of property without a court decision, not even a drug user/dealer). Still, Russians don't pay the tickets, so there is no way to stop rampant parking. The drivers park on the grass, in the flower-beds, in the playing ground, under the "No Parking" signs, around "No Parking" signs, near the firestation exits, on central city streets, everywhere. The ability of Prius to fit itself into the parking space would not be particularly useful for Russians, because they can just leave their car where they see fit. :)

P.S. This is true for St. Petersburg, situation may be slightly better in other cities.