Ford, Bosch, and Dan Gilbert’s real estate firm Bedrock today detailed an autonomous parking pilot scheduled to launch at The Assembly, a mixed-used building in Detroit, in September. Leveraging Bosch sensors that monitor driving corridors and their surroundings to guide vehicles to and from assigned spaces, Ford plans to demo how its cars can self-drive to parking spaces without human drivers onboard.
The autonomous parking valet — which the companies claim is the first of its kind in the U.S. — leans on a range of intelligent infrastructure supplied by Bosch. Complementary in-car Ford technology converts commands into driving maneuvers, enabling cars to drive themselves up and down ramps and spot potential hazards (including pedestrians).
Upon arriving at the garage, drivers will leave the test vehicle in a designated area and use an app to send it into an automated parking maneuver. They’ll use that same app to request the return of the vehicle to the same designated area.
The system’s reliance on sensors makes it potentially less capable than, say, Tesla’s Enhanced Summon, which navigates cars autonomously through virtually any parking lot. But Enhanced Summon doesn’t support multi-story garages, and it can’t currently park vehicles autonomously — only retrieve them. By contrast, Bosch and Ford say their platform can be deployed via retrofitted solutions or with embedded infrastructure planned into the construction of new garages that enables optimized design for maximum capacity.
The companies have no intention to extend the demo beyond September, but they say they hope to gain “valuable insights” that will help expand the technology in the future.
The pilot’s launch follows the rollout of Bosch and Daimler’s smartphone-controlled automated valet in the Mercedes-Benz Museum parking garage in Stuttgart. That setup is identical to the one in Detroit; Bosch and Daimler began developing fully automated driverless parking in 2015, and in 2017, their pilot in the Stuttgart garage became capable of automated parking in real conditions. A year later, the two companies began allowing Mercedes-Benz Museum visitors to use the parking service live, accompanied by trained safety personnel.
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