What is Auto Parking?

Amid what is the automotive industry's most intensive onslaught of innovation since Henry Ford set up the first production line, few technologies have attracted as much media attention as that known as ‘auto parking’, ‘park assist’ or ‘intelligent parking’.

Currently Ford is trumpeting its Active Park Assist in the freshly-launched Focus. The system's presence in an affordable small car is proof positive that the technology is here to stay. It's also a sign of the times that in less than five years, this seemingly most futuristic of technologies has dropped from the $200K sector, where it first arrived here in Lexus’s high-end LS series, to small cars.

It’s easy to understand why auto parking technology made the media impact it has. In short, it’s novel and it’s telegenic... Which has served to give it much more prominence than perhaps it deserves.

Auto parking is essentially an add-on hailing from the marriage of electric steering systems and radar sensors. What has at times been lost amid the noise is a true perspective on the place of auto parking technologies. Which is to say, it’s a bonus: a by-product of elements incorporated into the car for other, bigger, reasons.

“Electric steering systems are there for energy efficiency,” Peter Evans, Lexus’s local communications head and former product planning boss, told motoring.com.au.

“And the radar sensors are there for safety, in adaptive cruise systems. When those technologies appeared side by side in the same vehicle for disparate purposes, the engineers worked out pretty quickly that they could be married up for another useful purpose that stood to make the car smarter,” he said.

Adaptive cruise control uses front-mounted, forward-looking radar sensors to override speed settings in maintaining a preset distance from the vehicle in front, dramatically reducing the chance of rear-ending others in traffic. Latter day steering systems, meanwhile, use electric motors rather than engine-driven hydraulics to activate the power assistance on demand.

With both these in place, all it meant to extend their abilities to auto parking was to widen the line of sight of the adaptive cruise radar sensors sideways, adding similar ones at the rear and tweaking the vehicle’s management system to include a channel through which they could talk to each other.

How does it work? Typically, on pulling up beside an empty parallel parking space, the system calculates the car’s turning radius, its overall length and the positioning of its extremities against the available space. Confirming it will fit or otherwise, it tells you via guidelines on its multifunction console screen where to position it alongside the car in front, confirming when you’ve got it right. From there, you let go the wheel and let the car do the rest, at least until the time comes when the manoeuvre is complete. It leaves braking up to the driver.

Automakers are subjecting their auto parking systems to the same constant update regimens evident elsewhere. Those like Volkswagen whose early systems were parallel parking only have extended their abilities to get into 90-degree angle spots, and to extricate the car from tight parallel spots as well.

While all this sounds terrific and could no doubt prove useful for the elderly and the infirm, in reality it’s proved itself more important for sales and marketing departments than consumers. Everywhere it’s been launched it’s generated massive print, broadcast and online coverage.

Even though it’s not even that new, when Toyota debuted it in the second generation Prius in Japan as far back as 2003, no less than the BBC hung its story on the car-that-parks-itself peg. In subsequent years it took its place among the less important features of a model that assumed significance on so many other fronts. The Prius MkII now counts, after all, as the first car to put hybrid technology on the mainstream consumer map.

Elsewhere, including Australia, it was Lexus that got the ball rolling with the same technology in its fourth generation LS line-up. When that model debuted in the US in late 2006, it gained Lexus the publicity mother lode of a demo spot on Oprah Winfrey’s show.

This was enough to spook a few others. A subsequent US ad campaign touted Audi’s 2007 A4 as ‘the luxury car for people who can park themselves’. A Hyundai campaign from the same era used a cheeky feature-for-feature comparison between the LS460 and its own Azera – aka Grandeur – concluding that while its car didn’t have the technology, the price difference between the two would cover years of valet parking.

On its Australian launch in early 2007, the Lexus generated coverage of proportionally similar value. Journalists of the ilk of Nine Network veteran Peter Harvey gave it a run in prime-time news. All told, that being back in the day when Sydney and Melbourne still held motor shows in the same year, the local demo fleet chalked up more than 500 backward kilometres in reverse park demos.

How far has the technology penetrated the local market to date? It hasn’t yet made many standard equipment lists, but that looks set to change over time. Analyst Redbook lists it as standard in several models between the LS lineup on the top shelf and the new Ford Focus at street level. It’s been there in small Benzes since 2008, initially on the A-Class, now in the B Class that has effectively replaced it.

Toyota introduced it to the Aussie market in the current third generation Prius, launched in 2009. Skoda offers it in its Superb range – standard on the wagons, optional on the sedans.

Auto parking is appearing on the option lists of an increasing array of models too. Volkswagen, for example, offers it through the Golf, Tiguan, Passat and Eos ranges.

Despite its ready availability on its baby line-up, Benz has yet to roll it out in any great measure further up its range. It’s already available on some high-end CLS models.

Spokesman David McCarthy says it will appear on the upcoming ML series, due for launch here in Q1 2012, as part of an option pack. The S, E and C Class platforms? “No confirmation yet. But it will filter through our range, you can be assured of that.”

Take it that most of the others, European and Asian, are in the same position. While they have it at their disposal, they’re not sure yet when or how they will be introducing it. But given the increasing ubiquity of electric steering and the steady downmarket creep of adaptive cruise systems, rest assure we will be seeing more of it.

Peugeot, meanwhile, offers a half-measure in the form of a sensor-driven ‘available space measurement’ system that tells you the degree of difficulty you’ll experience fitting the car into a spot.

The French marque’s recently launched 508 medium lineup adds a couple of sensors of the type used for its front and rear parking beepers to the ends of the front bumper. At the touch of a switch, it measures the size of a parking space as it moves by and feeds back through the multifunction display screen whether parking is easy, difficult or impossible. Then it leaves you to it.