Comment by Traster

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.