When it comes to parking, I believe many car owners have a bitter stomach to pour.
Fortunately, technology companies and car companies have targeted the pain points of parking and used cutting-edge technologies such as autonomous driving to improve the negative impact caused by parking difficulties. And the best solution they came up with was to let the car find its own place to stop.
Over 80% of car owners encounter parking difficulties.
"When you don’t have a car, you always envy the coolness of having a car. When you have a car, you miss taking a taxi!"
Xiao Chen, a "northern drifter", finally got on the number this year and stepped into the ranks of car owners. But not long after, he found that troubles followed: driving in traffic jams was a common occurrence, and the problem of parking left him at a loss. Xiao Chen said frankly: "The company is downstairs or in the community, and the parking spaces are basically robbed. If you come late, you can only go around nearby. Sometimes I think about it, it is really better to take a taxi! "
There are also some car owners who are not only worried about finding a parking space.
For example, Karry, a member of the "TFboys" group, was exposed by the media this year to drive to Beijing Wukesong to watch a concert. As a result, he failed to successfully reverse the car into the warehouse because of his driving skills, which once led to congestion in the venue. This embarrassing scene was witnessed by female fans at the scene and sent a circle of friends.
Conventional parking lots have stumped some car owners, not to mention some unconventional parking lots with design defects. A female car owner surnamed Sun in Changsha, Hunan Province, said that some parking lots often have unfriendly designs such as serial turns, sharp bends with narrow margins and steep slopes, which makes people nervous and prone to accidents. There are also parking lots with chaotic layouts, just like a maze. "It’s more tiring to stop and find another car than to run 800 meters!"
The experience of these car owners above is not a case. In fact, parking difficulties have long been a common feeling of car owners. The "2018 Car Owners’ Life Satisfaction Survey" initiated by Wheel Big Data shows that the problem of difficult parking is widespread in first-to fifth-tier cities. In first-tier cities, only 12% of car owners are satisfied with the overall parking service in the city, and only 16% of car owners in other cities are satisfied at most. More than half of car owners will give up driving because of parking difficulties and choose alternative modes of travel instead.
High-tech puts forward "optimal solution"
Every real and unresolved pain point in human society often means huge business opportunities. In order to solve the parking problem, all walks of life have worked hard.
For example, parking companies such as Park Simple and ETCP have launched smart parking services, allowing car owners to find nearby parking spaces, pay parking fees, and find cars in reverse through their mobile phones, saving a lot of time and energy.
There are also some car manufacturers who start with the car itself and equip the car with an automatic parking assistant driving system to help the car owners solve technical problems. For example, some models of Mercedes-Benz, Buick, Volkswagen, etc. have the automatic parking function: the owner only needs to drive the car to the parking space to start this function, so that the car can control the steering wheel and park in place. However, in most cases, the owner still needs to sit in the driver’s seat all the time and control the throttle and brakes at any time.
With the further development of science and technology, a more radical parking solution has recently emerged-applying high-level autonomous driving technology to the parking scene, and through the linkage with smart parking lots, vehicles can independently complete the whole process of parking and picking up cars without any intervention, including a series of actions such as finding parking spaces, specifying routes to park in place, and even parking out, paying parking fees, and driving out of the parking lot. In this way, the owner only needs to drive the car to the door of the parking lot, just like having a private parking attendant. It seems that all kinds of troubles about parking, such as time, technology and psychology, can be solved by such an ultimate solution.
Compared with other local optimization solutions, parking service may be the best solution that the scientific and technological community can come up with at present. It is obviously more imaginative, but it is not far away from us.
Parking service’s "2020 Blueprint"
At present, many car companies, first-tier suppliers and artificial intelligence companies have started relevant research and development and landing layout. For example, Daimler and Bosch demonstrated the AVP automatic parking service scheme jointly developed by the two parties in China in September this year; Baidu announced in November that it would cooperate with Volkswagen to develop an autonomous parking product; In May this year, the self-driving company Heduo Technology made the first public demonstration of its self-developed self-driving parking service system "HoloParking", and held a product launch conference in December, and disclosed the specific landing schedule.
Among many schemes, the AVP scheme jointly developed by Daimler and Bosch and HoloParking of Heduo Technology should be the closest to landing. The former is expected to officially mass-produce vehicles equipped with parking service system from the end of 2019 to 2020, while the latter has announced a "2020 Plan": from 2019, Heduo Technology will be the main technical participant and cooperate with Shanghai Automobile City to carry out the "last mile" demonstration operation project; By 2020, some car owners will be able to park in more than 400 simple smart parking lots in 20 cities in China and enjoy the HoloParking Smart parking service service; In the future, the renovation cost of a single parking space in the parking lot will be controlled within 2020 yuan.
From this point of view, it is highly probable that 2020 will be the "first year" for smart parking service products to land.
The technical level of the product determines whether it is safe and reliable, and it is worth entrusting. In this regard, the AVP schemes of Daimler and Bosch, as well as HoloParking of Heduo Technology, all performed well in the actual exhibition. Coincidentally, neither of them is a pure car-side solution.
The AVP scheme of Daimler and Bosch focuses on the integration of the car end and the parking lot end. Under the condition that the intelligent infrastructure of the parking lot meets the requirements, the scheme does not require high sensors for vehicles, and it can be realized by the current production vehicles. Judging from the display effect, this AVP scheme successfully realized that the owner got off at the fixed drop-off area of the parking lot, and after starting the system through the mobile phone, the vehicle could find a vacancy in the garage by itself. When picking up the car, the vehicle can automatically start the ignition and drive to the pick-up area in advance to wait for the owner to take over.
HoloParking of Heduo Technology has added a high-precision map end in addition to the car end and the field end, which is a set of "three-in-one" technical solutions. According to Ni Kai, founder of Heduo Technology, HoloParking creates more redundancy through the integration of three terminals, which breaks through the bottleneck that the system is easily interfered by light and weather factors, and can adapt to various scenarios and have higher security. After practical testing, HoloParking can run stably in rainy days and darkness, and can cope with complex parking environment, becoming the first self-driving parking service product that supports all-weather, full-scene and real operation.
However, the technical perfection is only a part, and the large-scale promotion of smart parking service is still difficult. It is necessary to integrate various resources and forces including car companies, car suppliers, smart parking lots and car rental platforms. Therefore, players in this field are basically developing in groups with complementary advantages, hoping to jointly promote the blueprint into reality.
It is not only the owner who benefits.
The industry generally believes that once the smart parking service products are popularized, the benefits will be diversified.
The most intuitive beneficiary is the owner. Car owners will no longer need to worry about parking and have a more efficient and higher quality travel experience. At the same time, parking service makes it unnecessary for car owners to go in and out of the parking lot, thus being insulated from possible accidents such as rubbing, collision and crime in the parking lot, thus improving the safety.
If you look farther, the owner doesn’t have to go in and out of the parking lot, which is actually just the beginning. Ni Kai believes that with the development of product technology and the maturity of service operation, the "last mile" area centered on the parking lot will be formed in the near future, so that car owners can get on and off at the door of their homes and offices without going to the door of the parking lot, saving more time and energy. Especially in rain, snow, cold, hot and other weather, the owner will have a more intuitive experience of the "cool point" of this function.
Secondly, car companies and related parts suppliers will also benefit from it. When a new technology is destined to become the standard in the future, the enterprises that take the lead will undoubtedly have the first-Mover advantage, which is also a major motivation for car companies and top suppliers to actively embrace the trend of parking service.
Smart parking lots are also a big beneficiary. According to Ni Kai, the positioning accuracy of HoloParking has reached 5 cm, and the parking space can be as close as 10 cm, which is far less than the parking space under the condition of human driving, which can save parking space. Daimler and Bosch believe that the parking lot supporting parking service service can increase the parking capacity by about 20% by reducing the parking distance. It can be expected that if the parking lot can be completely unmanned in the future, the optimization effect in terms of operating cost, efficiency and revenue will be very impressive.
Smart parking service products can also empower car rental platforms. According to the analysis of Shanghai Auto News, parking service can reduce the operating cost of car rental platform and improve the experience of users to pick up and deliver cars.
From a more macro perspective, the social value that smart parking service products can create goes far beyond this.
A survey report by Inrix Research, a British transportation data supply company, reveals the connection between parking problems and social economy. According to the report, every British car owner spends an average of 44 hours a year looking for a parking space, which has caused economic losses of more than 30 billion pounds for car owners. In addition, more than 40% of British people are reluctant to drive to go shopping because of the headache of parking, which has also brought huge economic losses to local businesses.
Back in China, although there is no data to directly point out how much time and economic losses have been caused by parking problems, from the current poor parking experience, the situation is probably even more pessimistic. Therefore, the popularization of smart parking service products is expected to play an active role in reducing social losses caused by parking difficulties.