How often do you spend time driving around busy car parks looking for a parking space that never opens up?
If you live in a town and city, it’s probably quite a long time – with some drivers taking as much as 67 hours looking for a space per year, according to figures from travel data experts Inrix.
But the struggle of searching for vacant spaces could soon be over, thanks to Ford and its new feature known as ‘Parking Space Guidance’.
The firm has partnered with Vodafone for the new connected feature, which is being piloted to make finding parking spaces easier in city centres. The technology can display the exact number of spaces available in car parks, and also give drivers directions on how to get to each car park, which is displayed on the main touchscreen.
The data is received from car parks, while the models are also able to pick up data from digital road signs, which already tell drivers about the remaining spaces in car parks.
It’s currently just being trialled in Germany as part of a greater project looking into connected and autonomous technologies.
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Tobias Wallerius, a product development engineer at Ford of Europe, said: “Sat-navs are great at helping us to get to our destination but aren’t so useful when it comes to helping us to park there – especially in city centres.
“Parking Space Guidance is a connected‑vehicle technology that could help drivers to more quickly complete their journey, saving them money, time and benefitting overall air quality.”
Further connected technologies available include a system that can tell you how long a traffic light is remaining red or green for, which can help reduce the need for sharp braking. Tunnel information – such as lane closures and speed limits – is also being trialled, along with weather warnings detected from other cars.
