The place I'm working has a two-wide car lift within the building. I've seen these in Japan, but never here. It's kinda like driving into an automated car wash; pull up till the front tires fall into a recess on a mechanical plate, get out, go push the start button, and watch the car rise up out of sight. The whole mechanism rotates, presumably on something like a bicycle chain.
I've already been told horror stories, but so far so good.
Posted by Linkmeister at January 26, 2007 03:59 PM | TrackBackI've seen a smaller version of this in some of the parking lots of downtown New Orleans. Each parking space in the lot has a forklift-like contraption that lifts the first parked car in the space up in the air so that a second car can be parked beneath it.
Posted by: DXMachina at January 27, 2007 02:22 AMThis is the kind of stuff Gerry Anderson's Thunderbirds kept coming up in its depiction of the 21st century.
As for horror stories about what can go wrong with futuristic things... When I lived in Quebec, I had a buddy who one day did an improv, with sound effects and all, of what it'd be like to deal with a Syd Mead car in the middle of a Canadian winter.
Posted by: Serge at January 27, 2007 05:34 AMSyd Mead? I don't recognize the allusion. Help!
Posted by: Linkmeister at January 27, 2007 07:37 AMHe designed Bladerunner's flying cars.
Posted by: Serge at January 27, 2007 07:55 AMMechanical contraptions like that worry me just a little; back in the '70s I worked in an accounting firm that put in motorized shelves to store their audit workpapers - you pushed a button to open one aisle, and close the others. Nobody was hurt on ours - they had a deadman switch - but one of my colleagues had worked in a place where the motorized shelves DIDN'T have a deadman switch, and he was almost crushed one day. Gave me the heebies thinking about it.
Posted by: hedera at January 28, 2007 07:03 PMHmph! So 20th century.
"Would you trust a robot to park your car? The question will confront New Yorkers in February as the city's first robotic parking opens in Chinatown."
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/01/30/robotic.garage.ap/
Posted by: Keith at January 30, 2007 05:01 PMOdd coincidence, Keith. That made it onto the Advertiser's technology page today (yesterday? whenever) and I just finished reading it.
Posted by: Linkmeister at January 30, 2007 07:44 PM