Volvo's self-parking car

Now this is technology everyone can get behind... literally.

Forget about the growing number of 'self-parking cars' that do little more than steer while you operate brake and accelerator; Volvo is hinting it is close to bringing an autonomous parking-equipped vehicle to market. That vehicle may be the next-generation XC90, which Thomas Broberg, Senior Safety Advisor for Volvo, has revealed will come with 'autonomous steering'.

But autonomous steering is not necessarily the same as autonomous parking, which Volvo has now shown in action. In a video a V40 hatch negotiates a car park and finds itself a spot – with no one on board. The vehicle is a concept car at this point in time, but with the company disclosing it will introduce scalable product architecture developed with autonomous driving specifically in mind, the prospect of letting your car do the driving might be close at hand.

V40 already comes with what Volvo calls the Park Assist Pilot – the aforementioned system with limited autonomy. That and other sub-systems are mini milestones along the path to fully autonomous driving. An autonomous parking system will represent a major step forward on that path once it's available to consumers. Many of those consumers are likely to welcome a vehicle that can park itself, even if the rest of the autonomous driving package takes decades to arrive, as Mercedes-Benz recently suggested would be the case.

In a press release, Broberg hinted that the next XC90 will be able to park itself, much as the V40 in the video does.

"The autonomous parking and platooning technologies are still being developed," he was quoted saying. "However, we will take the first steps towards our leadership aim by introducing the first features with autonomous steering in the all-new Volvo XC90, which will be revealed at the end of 2014."

The problem with autonomous parking, as Volvo explains it, is the need for additional infrastructure. Transmitters must be located in the road surfaced of the designated parking area to transmit and receive from mobile phone to car and vice versa. As the video explains, instructing the vehicle to park itself is no more difficult than pressing an icon displayed on the screen of your smartphone. And having the vehicle decamp the parking spot to pick you up is equally easy.

"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," says Broberg.

But someone does have to pick up the tab to install those transmitters.

Just think about it though... no more sitting behind the wheel for 15 minutes, waiting for a parking space to open up at the local supermarket. No more taking your life in your hands arguing with the tattooed bogan who has just speared into the parking space you had been lining up. And best of all, no more swivelling of the head in all directions to watch for skateboarders, runaway shopping trolleys and badly parked 'pub cars' that are long past their prime.

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