So I'll have to park my car in a garage first, then take a bus to the terminal just so that a robot can move my car from the place where I parked it to a different place? I was hoping it'd be something where I'd pull up to the curb, grab my bags and head in while the robot parked the car for me but apparently I'll still have to take a bus to the terminal?
Exactly, i think this product is solving an airport problem and not a user problem. Whenever i park at an airport i always look for the shortest distance to terminal / price, then chose an option that lands within an acceptable range. Unless i'm way for very long shuttle-bus isn't really on the table.
Sometimes airport parking is insanely expensive (cough Schipol), so I'll park further away anyway or park somewhere I can get the train. If this helped lower costs I'd be fine with this but probably they'd keep the high price anyway.
It's solving the 'meatsack labor costs are really cramping my profitability' problem.
It's an inconveniently located valet service. But oh, you keep your keys. So it's really an inconvenient tow-truck valet service - or two guys with fork lifts.
It's still an impressive engineering feat, and (probably, given recent AI advances) an incredible time to market. I wonder when they started working on this, how big their company is, how much training data they put into it, etc.
Isn't this just automated valet parking? Valet parking allows more efficient use of space, which makes it cheaper in places where space is at a premium. Automating it would change that tradeoff in a way that benefits the customer.
I look for most spacious parking place with wide approach lanes, then shortest distance. Some car parks at the airports are just ridiculous. So narrow you can't exit the car.
Implementation is everything. If there’s enough capacity to drive up and drop your car off without queueing, and your car is ready to go as you leave the terminal then it sounds great. If there’s a half hour wait to get into the drop off zone, and another half hour wait after picking up your bags, and a half hour walk to the pickup/dropoff area then I’d prefer a 30 min shuttle.
I think this is solving the 'airport parking' problem my dad has. He drives to the airport, parks a mile or so away in some field and the company that owns the field drops him off at the terminal. He can leave his car there for the week.
This feels like a clever solution to have some spaces closer to the airport and many spaces further away.
Turn on satellite view and you can see it is on the edge of the long stay parking. I dunno if you're realistically going to save a lot of time unless your parking space is right at the back of the long stay car park. Worth it if it's free! I assume it's overpriced though.
Yes, it doesn't make a lot of sense if you can't pull up close to the terminal and leave your car there for the robot to park. But I assume this is just a prototype/trial of the robot tech with a view to expanding it in the future. Presumably they didn't want the risk of broken down (or stuck/confused) parking robots clogging up the busy airport drop off area.
Think of it as picking the parking garage or lot you like, but skipping the hunt for an open spot.
As these things go, if the service provider is able to make step one work and the airport continues the partnership, an eventual step would indeed be coming closer to or at the terminal, and the robot scooters (sounds a little like scaled-up warehouse robots) would move the car to storage.
Well that’s the design / usability / real needs part. Which is what these projects often miss. I see often tech replacing parts of a workflow but in reality the process / flow remains the same. Now some parts are digital and we call this “progress”. Strictly speaking it’s digitization but not progress.
Not a problem for me, :) I always take a shuttle or an Uber to the airport from where I parked, which is 10-15 mins away, because parking at the airport(JFK, LaGuardia, Newark at least) is stupid expensive
The article says:
> The facility is within walking distance of the South Terminal, although a free shuttle bus is also available.
I will give you a reason why this might be useful. Not at Gatwick. (I always took the train when I lived in that area and usually ended up at Heathrow or Stanstead anyway). But at Raleigh NC for example, you have to go up 5 levels to find a spot, (I have never seen an open spot on levels 1-4) and spend about 10 minutes or more finding a spot after that, then walking from your spot to the elevator, then back out. Or sometimes the lot is filled up, and you have to drive to a lot far away, then spend even longer finding a spot that will be at the far end of the lot, then walking a good distance to the bus terminal.
That's if you know the system, and are aware that you won't find spots on the lower levels, and that the "x spots open" indicators are lying. If you're new, you can spend 30+ minutes on a goose chase, miss your flight etc.
This solves that problem; not the bus one. (If the drop-off location is easy to access; if not, then it's pointless)
> "you won't find spots on the lower levels, ... the "x spots open" indicators are lying"
A simpler and cheaper solution would be to fix those availability signs. Surely this is not a problem that a few cameras and some smart software couldn't solve.
I am quite surprised by the amount of negative comments here. My immediate reaction after watching the video is that this is pretty cool and I want to try it, even though I expect issues given that it is the first service of this kind in London.
Personally I wonder why didn't they put several Pater Noster parking machines instead.
Systems with eight slots have decent throughout, the same density as cars parked side-by-side and bumper-to-bumper - even including the space needed to roll out - and are mechanically simple compared to just about anything else in this space.
Replacing "hand over your keys" with "perform detailed inspection of your vehicle, including undercarriage and suspension for damage before leaving" doesn't sound particularly enticing. Given I'm capable of parking my own vehicle without having an anxiety attack in the process I'm also fairly certain this thing doesn't solve any of my problems. I am likewise surprised that this seemingly pointless, grossly overengineered system that is nakedly hostile to minimum wage tier workers like valet service drivers isn't being warmly received here, but for different reasons.
As a general rule, you should take the train to Gatwick if you can, but this is reasonably priced and next time I'm flying from Gatwick I'll probably drive and do this - the train route for me is a bit fiddly, and the worst bit of any London airport for a local is long-stay parking. I'm much closer to Heathrow but the flights from LGW are so much cheaper, it more than covers two weeks of parking at this price.
I always wonder with solutions like these how stuff like alarm systems on the car cope with the car being lifted, the vibrations encountered as its being towed.
Unless they tell you to switch the alarm system off I guess.
I don't think car alarms detect these kinds of vibrations. It's specifically tilt and more impactful stuff. Certainly, the alarm is never going off when I get my car back via the lifts that I've used. It's probably too smooth.
The problem will be aftermarket car alarms. There used to be a car that parked on the street near my apartment that would go off ever time a bus went by it.
Illegally parked Cars are regularly lifted up and put into the back of flatbed lorries or towed away on back two wheels so this is arguably more gentle!
I asked this once in the past, but...do car alarms actually stop any actual crime ever? My entire life, every time I've ever heard a car alarm go off, literally everyone around just rolls their eyes and ignores it. If I actually looked up at a car alarm and the person outside the car just said "I'm so sorry! You know how it is", I would probably just nod and move on without really taking the time to figure out if it was really their car (because even if they were breaking in I don't have any desire to risk an altercation with someone doing that, and even if I were inclined to call law enforcement, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't come do anything because some random car's alarm is going off).
I want to be open minded that I'm missing something, but I can't help but feel like car alarms are just security theater with a side of nose pollution.
Having been to Gatwick plenty of times, the weakness with this vs the already existing valet parking is that the valet parking is just 1 story of the short stay car park.
You just drive up, drop your keys and go, your car is parked in a long line of cars that they can asynchronously drive off to long stay. The key thing is the location - you're a 30 second walk over a bridge into the terminal. Probably a hundred cars can be sitting waiting to be driven off to the long stay at the time, so they can handle the drop off/pick up of many cars at once. Whereas with this solution each "bay" will be occupied for a time while the autonomous robot drives off the previous vehicle, so you either need to over-provision - have many robots servicing a single bay to cope with peak times, or you'll need some local skid buffer.
From a customer point of view. This is on the outskirts of the airport so it's a much longer walk without a covered path (so you'll get wet because at some point it will start raining again in the UK). It's maybe slightly better than long stay, where you do need a bus journey (which tbh isn't that bad). But I'm not sure how much juice is in this application to squeeze.
Presumably this robotic valet will shift more towards long-term parking distant from the airport when it's known a customer is not returning. Today that's presumably cost ineffective.
It's quite reasonably priced too (for airport parking), about £80 a week booking for September today. I paid that for short stay parking at Stansted earlier this summer.
That is pretty good pricing. I’m surprised. I wonder if this is just introductory pricing. It seems like there’s not much throughput for something like this. I can’t see how this could handle a constant stream of people wanting to park their cars.
> It seems like there’s not much throughput for something like this. I can’t see how this could handle a constant stream of people wanting to park their cars.
Assume your car park is a grid of cars, 20 cars wide and 20 cars long, i.e. 400 parking spaces.
You make the entire first row drop-off/pick up points. With 20 pick up/drop off points you can have a lot of people dropping off or picking up at the same time. And you know pretty well when people will be picking up their cars, as you know their flight arrival details.
Assume your average airport parking customer parks for 5 days, that's 80 arrivals and 80 departures per day. Each of your 20 pick-up/drop-off points only needs to handle 4 pick-ups and 4 drop-offs per day. To me that sounds feasible.
I'd be curious how it handles someone parking poorly in that bay e.g. diagonally. Presumably those lines serve as a parking guide and the door won't close unless you park correctly.
The local car wash has lights that help you park the car pretty precisely under the wash robot. No rails or anything, you park right underneath the robot and it moves around and over the car. The robot doesn't start until you are in position.
IMO this would be a terrible idea to let the robots park cars in the same car park as humans. They most likely have a dedicated car park for this where ever car is parked by a robot.
The article says:
"A Stanley Robotics autonomous parking robot then slides underneath the vehicle, lifts it by its tyres and transports it to a secure storage area."
I think the OP was talking about humans parking weirdly in the garage the robot picks them up from, not the car park itself—the car park itself is robot only (so they can jam cars together).
You could pack the cars so close together that no one could get into them. Could be seen as a bit of a theft deterrent, although I’m sure the car park itself is pretty secure.
Will it meet the same fate as the gimmicky Autosafe SkyPark that opened in 2001 and went bankrupt in 2003, and still had cars in it when the building was demolished nearly 20 years later?
Wonder what the actual limit is and what happens when you're above it (and the other max. dimensions)? Couple of EVs out there that are heavier than 2.6 tonnes now. (Volvo EX90, Mercedes EQS, BMW iX, Ioniq 9, Rivians (not yet in the UK), ... and many more right around that weight.)
Is it getting measured in the cabin and declines you?
Since you have to book in advance, I guess you give them the number plate details. They can look it up online to see what kind of vehicle it is and can decline to book if too heavy. They can cross check the number plate when you arrive.
I wonder how many people will forget to roll up their windows because they parked in a garage, then the robot leaves the car outside for a week, then the owner comes back to find the car back in the garage but inexplicably soggy and full of mold.
Does the process have a check for forgotten windows?
It's not quite clear from the video but it looks to me like you park up in the garage, and there's a garage door on the other side. So as you 'check in', I guess the 'human' side you drove in on, that door closes, and then the other side opens for the robots to collect the car which I'm guessing is also where the car storage is.
Sort of feels like those videos you see of high tech warehouses where the human workers really only operate on the outskirts of the building, and everything central is completely automated (picking, sorting, storing, inventory etc)
Just in case anyone else is wondering, that article mentions that you get to keep your keys no less than eight times, while being light on all other details.
I guess we can add this to the ever-growing list of extremely expensive, complicated, inefficient and convoluted solutions to problems that end with the final specification: "but it can't be a train".
My company used to cover a car service for us (limo), my door to the terminal.
When they set up the AirTrain, I stopped using the car service. It took longer, but I have always had a soft spot for mass transit, and I kind of got a kick out of boarding a train in Huntington, NY, and leaving the train, in Shinagawa.
Its gatwick, 3 lines go here, one every 15 minutes. I have always taken the train to either Heathrow or Gatwick, there's always been more than enough space to accomodate luggage, idk what people here are on about.
I mean, it probably depends on the train line? Only airport train I’ve ever had issues with was Manchester, and more due to an absolutely ridiculous ticketing situation than anything else.
Yeah because I want to haul all my luggage on a train journey when I go to the airport. I’ll take a train to a lot of places but the airport is not one of them.
Easier to haul my luggage on a train designed for that purpose than take a car and spend longer parking it than the entire train journey. I live 10 minutes from Gatwick, have never driven there, and don’t understand why anyone would want to if there’s any alternative.
Doesn't have to be binary. Train is more efficient at moving large volume of people reliably compared to a bus or a taxi. I would wager that there are many more people travelling with carry-on only or a single bag for which train is more than adequate.
> The service must be booked in advance. Same-day drive-up parking is not available.
Interesting, I wonder if this is just a "Like to be able to see availability and cross-reference data to set individual pricing" or if it's because of a technical limitation, and if so, what could that possibly be?
This seems like valet parking-like but drivers keep their keys. Possibly solving the untrustworthy valet problem, but unlikely to be price-competitve with the cheap off-site parking firms that usually get mentioned in the consumer problems columns.
This is interesting for the point of saving space. You need a lot less space between cars and can easily park multiple rows without having to leave egress space. All you then need to do is move 3 other cars.
I wonder what the failure mode for something like this is (e.g. in bad weather, after a power cut, a car catches fire, etc). Nobody in the country with keys, cars parked so close together you probably couldn't get in anyway... could be interesting!
BEV thermal runaway fires are certainly not a solved problem. I'm not sure they are as common as some critics suggest, but they are difficult when they happen.
Of all the airports to do it at in the UK this is probably the one that doesn’t need it. Parking at Gatwick is a breeze, lots of options close and far from the airport and quite reasonably priced. Now Luton, that’s another story.
I remember parking in central London where you left your car in a single space inside a building and it would whisk it up onto some unseen location. I think that was under human control but maybe it will make a comeback with automation.
It is because these kind of systems are complicated bespoke automation. When it breaks down it costs a fortune to fix it. And what can happen is that different parties (operators vs manufacture vs maintainer) gets into a contract dispute to see who is liable to pay to get it fixed. Which as you can guess can take years to play out. Meanwhile your vehicle is stuck and nobody who could is interested in spending a penny on getting it out.
In contrast to that this project is better in two ways. There are multiple robots. (or at least there really should be) So if one breaks down the other robots can still retrieve cars (albeit of course with reduced throughput). And because the storage is just a flat parking lot if all the robots give up the ghost at the same time humans can drive out the cars from the edges of the storage rows.
Where was this? I've only seen it in London at very high end residential places. Even then it's rare. Most privately-owned public car parks in London are dilapidated and full of thieves, but still command premium pricing. It would surprise me if one bothered to build the infra for this.
I never thought about this, can you steal cars by lifting them like that in the air? Not that I think that will happen, but it would be really funny to hack such a robot and just collect cars around
This technique is frequently used by towing companies impounding cars and reposession agents collecting cars for loan defaults - absolutely you can pick up and take a car away with the right hardware.
Just for most people a stolen locked car isn’t really of much uses.
There are systems where you park your car on a moving platform and the whole platform slots into an underground warehouse. That seems simpler and safer.
I may be a socialist but being able to bring your heavy luggage to the door of the place you already pay a fee to be at (airport taxes) should be free, no? Like in all other parts of Europe
And they say, oh, no, you can come for free if you’re willing to walk 15 minutes to the terminal. No, that’s greed plain and simple.
A sci-fi dream i have is that cars and their engines decouple. That you just own a shell, an egg, and the town owns all the engines. (This dream also includes warehouses and delivery robots of many sizes owned by the town too).
In a funny way, this sort of does that. Sure your car still has an engine but this very much is the car-shell tractor, in practice. This is really neat to see.
I wish them luck. I hope it is reliable enough! It looks pretty straightforwards in how it picks up wheels, which is neat.
Great, now let's (gradually) get rid of all surface parking lots and build hyper-optimized multi-floor parking setups not made for human driving. A sort of Ocado Grocery Warehouse [1] for cars.
As far as I understand, first one Ocado robot went on fire, it doesn't have a sensor for fire so it kept going. Neither do its neighbours, who pass right by it and catch fire themselves. And so it keeps going until everything is on fire.
I heard horror stories, where "secure storage area" was actually a field without any security. Not saying this is the case here, but one must be mad to give a car like that without knowing exact location it is going.
It's one of the things where I can't see what is there robot's role here.
I doubt the robots have sufficient enough traction/mobility to navigate on any surface that isn't reasonably smooth like tarmac. Also I'd wager the car park the robots go to isn't that far away from the drop off location, most likely on the same land owned by the airport.
So I'll have to park my car in a garage first, then take a bus to the terminal just so that a robot can move my car from the place where I parked it to a different place? I was hoping it'd be something where I'd pull up to the curb, grab my bags and head in while the robot parked the car for me but apparently I'll still have to take a bus to the terminal?
Exactly, i think this product is solving an airport problem and not a user problem. Whenever i park at an airport i always look for the shortest distance to terminal / price, then chose an option that lands within an acceptable range. Unless i'm way for very long shuttle-bus isn't really on the table.
Sometimes airport parking is insanely expensive (cough Schipol), so I'll park further away anyway or park somewhere I can get the train. If this helped lower costs I'd be fine with this but probably they'd keep the high price anyway.
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It's solving the 'meatsack labor costs are really cramping my profitability' problem.
It's an inconveniently located valet service. But oh, you keep your keys. So it's really an inconvenient tow-truck valet service - or two guys with fork lifts.
It's still an impressive engineering feat, and (probably, given recent AI advances) an incredible time to market. I wonder when they started working on this, how big their company is, how much training data they put into it, etc.
What is the name of the company that built this?
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Isn't this just automated valet parking? Valet parking allows more efficient use of space, which makes it cheaper in places where space is at a premium. Automating it would change that tradeoff in a way that benefits the customer.
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I look for most spacious parking place with wide approach lanes, then shortest distance. Some car parks at the airports are just ridiculous. So narrow you can't exit the car.
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Implementation is everything. If there’s enough capacity to drive up and drop your car off without queueing, and your car is ready to go as you leave the terminal then it sounds great. If there’s a half hour wait to get into the drop off zone, and another half hour wait after picking up your bags, and a half hour walk to the pickup/dropoff area then I’d prefer a 30 min shuttle.
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I think this is solving the 'airport parking' problem my dad has. He drives to the airport, parks a mile or so away in some field and the company that owns the field drops him off at the terminal. He can leave his car there for the week.
This feels like a clever solution to have some spaces closer to the airport and many spaces further away.
That isn't how this works. It doesn't transport your car to a more distant car park - it simply "parks" your car in an available space.
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Article says one of the terminals is within walking distance
Anything is within walking distance if you're willing to walk...
Anyway here's where it is:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/YZKPXp7LSjc5jPot5
Turn on satellite view and you can see it is on the edge of the long stay parking. I dunno if you're realistically going to save a lot of time unless your parking space is right at the back of the long stay car park. Worth it if it's free! I assume it's overpriced though.
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Meanwhile their toilets are all completely down because of water supply failures[1]. A sad and funny juxtaposition.
1 - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jul/26/water-supply...
Yes, it doesn't make a lot of sense if you can't pull up close to the terminal and leave your car there for the robot to park. But I assume this is just a prototype/trial of the robot tech with a view to expanding it in the future. Presumably they didn't want the risk of broken down (or stuck/confused) parking robots clogging up the busy airport drop off area.
Think of it as picking the parking garage or lot you like, but skipping the hunt for an open spot.
As these things go, if the service provider is able to make step one work and the airport continues the partnership, an eventual step would indeed be coming closer to or at the terminal, and the robot scooters (sounds a little like scaled-up warehouse robots) would move the car to storage.
Well that’s the design / usability / real needs part. Which is what these projects often miss. I see often tech replacing parts of a workflow but in reality the process / flow remains the same. Now some parts are digital and we call this “progress”. Strictly speaking it’s digitization but not progress.
Not a problem for me, :) I always take a shuttle or an Uber to the airport from where I parked, which is 10-15 mins away, because parking at the airport(JFK, LaGuardia, Newark at least) is stupid expensive
The article says:
> The facility is within walking distance of the South Terminal, although a free shuttle bus is also available.
I will give you a reason why this might be useful. Not at Gatwick. (I always took the train when I lived in that area and usually ended up at Heathrow or Stanstead anyway). But at Raleigh NC for example, you have to go up 5 levels to find a spot, (I have never seen an open spot on levels 1-4) and spend about 10 minutes or more finding a spot after that, then walking from your spot to the elevator, then back out. Or sometimes the lot is filled up, and you have to drive to a lot far away, then spend even longer finding a spot that will be at the far end of the lot, then walking a good distance to the bus terminal.
That's if you know the system, and are aware that you won't find spots on the lower levels, and that the "x spots open" indicators are lying. If you're new, you can spend 30+ minutes on a goose chase, miss your flight etc.
This solves that problem; not the bus one. (If the drop-off location is easy to access; if not, then it's pointless)
> "you won't find spots on the lower levels, ... the "x spots open" indicators are lying"
A simpler and cheaper solution would be to fix those availability signs. Surely this is not a problem that a few cameras and some smart software couldn't solve.
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I guess the argument might be that it'll be faster than finding a spot. Slightly minor benefit is you don't need to remember where it's parked.
It's basically a larger version of P-Snurran they made in Stockholm back in 2023. It was like a CD changer for cars.
It's more like valet parking except you lock your car and keep your keys. I guess enough people don't trust someone else driving their car.
especially disappointing as there is valet parking at Gatwick that works exactly like that
Simultaneously - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jul/26/water-supply...
It’s exciting to invest in the future and not exciting to invest in infrastructure
Neither VINCI Airports nor Stanley Robotics are responsible for the water infrastructure in South East England.
I am quite surprised by the amount of negative comments here. My immediate reaction after watching the video is that this is pretty cool and I want to try it, even though I expect issues given that it is the first service of this kind in London.
Personally I wonder why didn't they put several Pater Noster parking machines instead.
Systems with eight slots have decent throughout, the same density as cars parked side-by-side and bumper-to-bumper - even including the space needed to roll out - and are mechanically simple compared to just about anything else in this space.
Replacing "hand over your keys" with "perform detailed inspection of your vehicle, including undercarriage and suspension for damage before leaving" doesn't sound particularly enticing. Given I'm capable of parking my own vehicle without having an anxiety attack in the process I'm also fairly certain this thing doesn't solve any of my problems. I am likewise surprised that this seemingly pointless, grossly overengineered system that is nakedly hostile to minimum wage tier workers like valet service drivers isn't being warmly received here, but for different reasons.
As a general rule, you should take the train to Gatwick if you can, but this is reasonably priced and next time I'm flying from Gatwick I'll probably drive and do this - the train route for me is a bit fiddly, and the worst bit of any London airport for a local is long-stay parking. I'm much closer to Heathrow but the flights from LGW are so much cheaper, it more than covers two weeks of parking at this price.
I always wonder with solutions like these how stuff like alarm systems on the car cope with the car being lifted, the vibrations encountered as its being towed.
Unless they tell you to switch the alarm system off I guess.
I don't think car alarms detect these kinds of vibrations. It's specifically tilt and more impactful stuff. Certainly, the alarm is never going off when I get my car back via the lifts that I've used. It's probably too smooth.
Car alarms go off all the time on ferries from cars that really don't like being locked and moved.
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The problem will be aftermarket car alarms. There used to be a car that parked on the street near my apartment that would go off ever time a bus went by it.
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Illegally parked Cars are regularly lifted up and put into the back of flatbed lorries or towed away on back two wheels so this is arguably more gentle!
Pretty sure the alarm cares more about tilt than vibration - indicates towing
I asked this once in the past, but...do car alarms actually stop any actual crime ever? My entire life, every time I've ever heard a car alarm go off, literally everyone around just rolls their eyes and ignores it. If I actually looked up at a car alarm and the person outside the car just said "I'm so sorry! You know how it is", I would probably just nod and move on without really taking the time to figure out if it was really their car (because even if they were breaking in I don't have any desire to risk an altercation with someone doing that, and even if I were inclined to call law enforcement, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't come do anything because some random car's alarm is going off).
I want to be open minded that I'm missing something, but I can't help but feel like car alarms are just security theater with a side of nose pollution.
"Unlike traditional valet parking, passengers retain possession of their keys throughout their trip."
"If passengers accidentally leave an essential item in the vehicle after drop-off, on-site staff will be available to retrieve emergency items."
But.. how would they get that emergency item if they don't have the keys?
You give them the keys, then they go to the site to collect your item.
They can turn your alarm off while they're fetching your pills.
I can remote lock/unlock my car from an app, so I’m guessing this is what they are thinking about.
Wouldn't that need the parked car to have internet?
First thing I thought, too. Seems like mutually exclusive features.
Having been to Gatwick plenty of times, the weakness with this vs the already existing valet parking is that the valet parking is just 1 story of the short stay car park.
You just drive up, drop your keys and go, your car is parked in a long line of cars that they can asynchronously drive off to long stay. The key thing is the location - you're a 30 second walk over a bridge into the terminal. Probably a hundred cars can be sitting waiting to be driven off to the long stay at the time, so they can handle the drop off/pick up of many cars at once. Whereas with this solution each "bay" will be occupied for a time while the autonomous robot drives off the previous vehicle, so you either need to over-provision - have many robots servicing a single bay to cope with peak times, or you'll need some local skid buffer.
From a customer point of view. This is on the outskirts of the airport so it's a much longer walk without a covered path (so you'll get wet because at some point it will start raining again in the UK). It's maybe slightly better than long stay, where you do need a bus journey (which tbh isn't that bad). But I'm not sure how much juice is in this application to squeeze.
Presumably this robotic valet will shift more towards long-term parking distant from the airport when it's known a customer is not returning. Today that's presumably cost ineffective.
It's quite reasonably priced too (for airport parking), about £80 a week booking for September today. I paid that for short stay parking at Stansted earlier this summer.
Wow, who is subsidizing it?
London Gatwick is outside of London, so I assume land costs are low enough that a multi-story car park isn't too expensive.
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That is pretty good pricing. I’m surprised. I wonder if this is just introductory pricing. It seems like there’s not much throughput for something like this. I can’t see how this could handle a constant stream of people wanting to park their cars.
> It seems like there’s not much throughput for something like this. I can’t see how this could handle a constant stream of people wanting to park their cars.
Assume your car park is a grid of cars, 20 cars wide and 20 cars long, i.e. 400 parking spaces.
You make the entire first row drop-off/pick up points. With 20 pick up/drop off points you can have a lot of people dropping off or picking up at the same time. And you know pretty well when people will be picking up their cars, as you know their flight arrival details.
Assume your average airport parking customer parks for 5 days, that's 80 arrivals and 80 departures per day. Each of your 20 pick-up/drop-off points only needs to handle 4 pick-ups and 4 drop-offs per day. To me that sounds feasible.
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https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jul/26/water-supply...
As long as you don't want to use the toilet.
It's the perfect juxtaposition of stories.
Seems it's becoming all too frequent in Kent and Sussex
More fun to spend millions on AI than fixing literal shit.
Even more fun to bash AI from the comfort of HN without knowing how much AI is being used, or at all, in this case.
I'd be curious how it handles someone parking poorly in that bay e.g. diagonally. Presumably those lines serve as a parking guide and the door won't close unless you park correctly.
The local car wash has lights that help you park the car pretty precisely under the wash robot. No rails or anything, you park right underneath the robot and it moves around and over the car. The robot doesn't start until you are in position.
IMO this would be a terrible idea to let the robots park cars in the same car park as humans. They most likely have a dedicated car park for this where ever car is parked by a robot.
The article says:
"A Stanley Robotics autonomous parking robot then slides underneath the vehicle, lifts it by its tyres and transports it to a secure storage area."
Which seems to suggest this.
It sounds like the actual lot will be robots only as it mentions parking cars closer together to maximize capacity.
I think the OP was talking about humans parking weirdly in the garage the robot picks them up from, not the car park itself—the car park itself is robot only (so they can jam cars together).
The parent is wondering about parking in the bay, before the robot picks it up.
Robot = some 3rd world country guy driving in remotely
You could pack the cars so close together that no one could get into them. Could be seen as a bit of a theft deterrent, although I’m sure the car park itself is pretty secure.
That's the value change right? You can park more densely as no one needs to get in our out of the vehicle.
Will it meet the same fate as the gimmicky Autosafe SkyPark that opened in 2001 and went bankrupt in 2003, and still had cars in it when the building was demolished nearly 20 years later?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-4...
> Maximum weight: 2.6 tonnes
Wonder what the actual limit is and what happens when you're above it (and the other max. dimensions)? Couple of EVs out there that are heavier than 2.6 tonnes now. (Volvo EX90, Mercedes EQS, BMW iX, Ioniq 9, Rivians (not yet in the UK), ... and many more right around that weight.)
Is it getting measured in the cabin and declines you?
Since you have to book in advance, I guess you give them the number plate details. They can look it up online to see what kind of vehicle it is and can decline to book if too heavy. They can cross check the number plate when you arrive.
TIL you can just look up vehicle information via number plate in the UK.
Possible I guess, but what if you don't have UK plates?
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I wonder how many people will forget to roll up their windows because they parked in a garage, then the robot leaves the car outside for a week, then the owner comes back to find the car back in the garage but inexplicably soggy and full of mold.
Does the process have a check for forgotten windows?
In the UK, pretty much zero. Nobody ever leaves their windows down when they leave their car.
Is parking with the windows open a normal thing to do in the UK?
I have never seen anyone ever park and leave their windows open. Ever
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In a garage?
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My car rolls up the windows after a while if I leave it and lock it. I though pretty much all cards did.
This problem has already been solved, better. 100 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_elevator
It's not quite clear from the video but it looks to me like you park up in the garage, and there's a garage door on the other side. So as you 'check in', I guess the 'human' side you drove in on, that door closes, and then the other side opens for the robots to collect the car which I'm guessing is also where the car storage is.
Sort of feels like those videos you see of high tech warehouses where the human workers really only operate on the outskirts of the building, and everything central is completely automated (picking, sorting, storing, inventory etc)
The reality of this is a lot less exciting than the headline implies.
Just in case anyone else is wondering, that article mentions that you get to keep your keys no less than eight times, while being light on all other details.
I miss publications with skilled human editors.
Will probably not be long until a YouTuber tries to hide in their car while it gets picked up. Would make for a fun video.
Tom Scott perhaps? Though he will likely get full access to the system.
This seems little different from the Automated Parking Systems that I saw in widespread use in Japan from the 1980's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_parking_system
(The main difference being 3D in Japan and 2D at Gatwick)
I guess we can add this to the ever-growing list of extremely expensive, complicated, inefficient and convoluted solutions to problems that end with the final specification: "but it can't be a train".
My company used to cover a car service for us (limo), my door to the terminal.
When they set up the AirTrain, I stopped using the car service. It took longer, but I have always had a soft spot for mass transit, and I kind of got a kick out of boarding a train in Huntington, NY, and leaving the train, in Shinagawa.
But there is a train to Gatwick.
It's not very good - late around half the time.
https://www.gatwickexpress.com/how-were-performing/train-ser...
Yes, let's depend on a train for my time-sensitive journey with lots of awkward luggage.
Do you people even ride trains? Are you OK with the 50/50 odds of gettings home on time?
Its gatwick, 3 lines go here, one every 15 minutes. I have always taken the train to either Heathrow or Gatwick, there's always been more than enough space to accomodate luggage, idk what people here are on about.
A train system is a much safer bet than praying traffic won't be bad
Trains are literally scheduled according to a timetable... traffic isn’t
Took the south Florida brightline 3 times, recently, to get to the airport (+2 times for leisure travel) and it was pretty good.
Get there by rideshare in 20 mins, trains on time, 1hr to city, 10 min shuttle to airport. On time every time.
I moved my luggage by hand more WITHIN the airport than getting to the airport.
Would do it again
I mean, it probably depends on the train line? Only airport train I’ve ever had issues with was Manchester, and more due to an absolutely ridiculous ticketing situation than anything else.
Yeah because I want to haul all my luggage on a train journey when I go to the airport. I’ll take a train to a lot of places but the airport is not one of them.
Easier to haul my luggage on a train designed for that purpose than take a car and spend longer parking it than the entire train journey. I live 10 minutes from Gatwick, have never driven there, and don’t understand why anyone would want to if there’s any alternative.
Taxis I understand.
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My company pays for taxi from my door to the airport and I still take the train, unless I am leaving before dawn.
There is both a rational environment choice in that, and a nice feeling of being part of a humming crowd
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Presumably, you've never taken the Heathrow Express? That is a train journey that is always better than a car. The Gatwick Express, not so much.
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Doesn't have to be binary. Train is more efficient at moving large volume of people reliably compared to a bus or a taxi. I would wager that there are many more people travelling with carry-on only or a single bag for which train is more than adequate.
I travel 40-50 times a year by flight and I absolutely don't mind taking the train. I live in Zürich which has an excellent rail network.
15 quid that it won't work without installing an app that could have been a website or a card swipe terminal
> The service must be booked in advance. Same-day drive-up parking is not available.
Interesting, I wonder if this is just a "Like to be able to see availability and cross-reference data to set individual pricing" or if it's because of a technical limitation, and if so, what could that possibly be?
Well if there are 100 cars waiting in line for the little garage to be available it defeats the purpose
This seems like valet parking-like but drivers keep their keys. Possibly solving the untrustworthy valet problem, but unlikely to be price-competitve with the cheap off-site parking firms that usually get mentioned in the consumer problems columns.
This is interesting for the point of saving space. You need a lot less space between cars and can easily park multiple rows without having to leave egress space. All you then need to do is move 3 other cars.
Give a buffer that should be feasible.
I wonder what the failure mode for something like this is (e.g. in bad weather, after a power cut, a car catches fire, etc). Nobody in the country with keys, cars parked so close together you probably couldn't get in anyway... could be interesting!
> a car catches fire
That's a solved problem, drench the car in copious amounts of water and flush all oxygen with high pressure CO2 tanks.
BEV thermal runaway fires are certainly not a solved problem. I'm not sure they are as common as some critics suggest, but they are difficult when they happen.
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Of all the airports to do it at in the UK this is probably the one that doesn’t need it. Parking at Gatwick is a breeze, lots of options close and far from the airport and quite reasonably priced. Now Luton, that’s another story.
I remember parking in central London where you left your car in a single space inside a building and it would whisk it up onto some unseen location. I think that was under human control but maybe it will make a comeback with automation.
There are some horror stories when those kind of systems break down.
For example this one is about a van which got stuck in one for two years: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx207jwknp5o
Or there was one in Sweden which trapped cars for 2 months: https://www.mitti.se/nyheter/fnurret-pa-psnurran--m-vill-se-... (sorry, could only find a swedish source)
It is because these kind of systems are complicated bespoke automation. When it breaks down it costs a fortune to fix it. And what can happen is that different parties (operators vs manufacture vs maintainer) gets into a contract dispute to see who is liable to pay to get it fixed. Which as you can guess can take years to play out. Meanwhile your vehicle is stuck and nobody who could is interested in spending a penny on getting it out.
In contrast to that this project is better in two ways. There are multiple robots. (or at least there really should be) So if one breaks down the other robots can still retrieve cars (albeit of course with reduced throughput). And because the storage is just a flat parking lot if all the robots give up the ghost at the same time humans can drive out the cars from the edges of the storage rows.
Where was this? I've only seen it in London at very high end residential places. Even then it's rare. Most privately-owned public car parks in London are dilapidated and full of thieves, but still command premium pricing. It would surprise me if one bothered to build the infra for this.
I remember using one in Fleet Street in the eighties.
I never thought about this, can you steal cars by lifting them like that in the air? Not that I think that will happen, but it would be really funny to hack such a robot and just collect cars around
This technique is frequently used by towing companies impounding cars and reposession agents collecting cars for loan defaults - absolutely you can pick up and take a car away with the right hardware.
Just for most people a stolen locked car isn’t really of much uses.
Already invented protection for this. https://youtube.com/watch?v=n1Ug4I89c98
Yes. If you can get under it.
There are systems where you park your car on a moving platform and the whole platform slots into an underground warehouse. That seems simpler and safer.
I don’t think they’re mechanically simpler. Those kinds of underground garages probably require a lot of maintenance to keep running.
Wow finally something capable of parking cars! I'm sure it'll be so much better and cheaper than just paying valets to do it too!
Are these not the guys that ask like 7 pounds to drive up to kiss & fly? Good to see that money’s put to good use!
You're behind the times. It's 10 pounds now.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2lqd72d4lqo
£7 is about the price of a pint. Surely that’s worth it given the convenience of driving right up to the front door of the terminal?
I may be a socialist but being able to bring your heavy luggage to the door of the place you already pay a fee to be at (airport taxes) should be free, no? Like in all other parts of Europe
And they say, oh, no, you can come for free if you’re willing to walk 15 minutes to the terminal. No, that’s greed plain and simple.
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The cookie screen for this web site is the most deceitful I’ve come across in a long time. How do I report this?
Meanwhile, Gatwick currently doesn't have running toilets: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdew2dnxlzzo
How about we fix basic issue as a species first, before going all robots and AI and trips to Mars?
meanwhile, in japan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voYdl7IFZsM
>Gatwick Airport left without running water after major outage
https://archive.ph/IrBH8#selection-575.0-575.61
parking was the one part of the airport experience that wasn't broken. naturally, that's what they fixed first.
I wonder what their secure parking area looks like.
A fenced off flat parking lot with a few cameras here and there. Not sure what you expect.
Well that's why I ask - a lot of 'secure' airport parking suffers from people stealing from it.
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You can see it on Google maps: https://maps.app.goo.gl/MQjWHbbc5jeUryGU7?g_st=ic
So is it that normal looking parking area or is that a multi storey behind the places they show in the video?
If you knew what it looked like, it wouldn't be as secure!
In what way is this better than an uber?
Price, depending on how far away you live.
A sci-fi dream i have is that cars and their engines decouple. That you just own a shell, an egg, and the town owns all the engines. (This dream also includes warehouses and delivery robots of many sizes owned by the town too).
In a funny way, this sort of does that. Sure your car still has an engine but this very much is the car-shell tractor, in practice. This is really neat to see.
I wish them luck. I hope it is reliable enough! It looks pretty straightforwards in how it picks up wheels, which is neat.
Great, now let's (gradually) get rid of all surface parking lots and build hyper-optimized multi-floor parking setups not made for human driving. A sort of Ocado Grocery Warehouse [1] for cars.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE
As always, yes I know this already exists in Japan.
Not the best example...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQQlREtqAM8
As far as I understand, first one Ocado robot went on fire, it doesn't have a sensor for fire so it kept going. Neither do its neighbours, who pass right by it and catch fire themselves. And so it keeps going until everything is on fire.
The video didn't show how it actually gets under your t[y|i]res and then gets out from under your tires when it's moved it.
Can it handle EVs safely? The bottom battery often causes...issues if you don't have a lifting puck to spread the weight.
So robots: yes. Water: no.
This is so unnecessary. Just make better transit options and make it more affordable for people to go to airport.
Why even go to the airport? Take the train to where you are going.
I heard horror stories, where "secure storage area" was actually a field without any security. Not saying this is the case here, but one must be mad to give a car like that without knowing exact location it is going.
It's one of the things where I can't see what is there robot's role here.
I doubt the robots have sufficient enough traction/mobility to navigate on any surface that isn't reasonably smooth like tarmac. Also I'd wager the car park the robots go to isn't that far away from the drop off location, most likely on the same land owned by the airport.
My guess is they take the car away from the drop off point to employee pick up point and human drives them away to the "secure location".
Am I the only one bothered because the license plate masking they have used is so bad that you can see the License plate whole several times?
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