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Volvo creates self-parking car

Volvo has developed a concept vehicle that finds and parks itself without the driver inside the car. It will also interact with other cars and pedestrians in the surrounding area.

Watch the self-parking car

Thomas Broberg, senior safety advisor for Volvo, said: "Autonomous Parking is a concept technology that relieves the driver of the task of finding a vacant parking space. The driver just drops the vehicle off at the entrance to the car park and picks it up in the same place later.”

AT YOUR SERVICE

Transmitters in the road infrastructure inform the driver when the service is available. They then use a mobile phone application to activate the parking.

The vehicle uses sensors to navigate to a free parking space and the procedure is reversed when the driver comes back to pick up the car.

Combining it with autonomous driving, which uses detection and auto brake for other objects, make it possible for the car to interact safely in the car park.

"Our approach is based on the principle that autonomously driven cars must be able to move safely in environments with non-autonomous vehicles and unprotected road users," said Thomas Broberg.

"The autonomous parking and other technologies are still being developed. However, we will take the first steps towards our goal by introducing the first features with autonomous steering in the new Volvo XC90, which will be revealed at the end of 2014.”

As Audi works on self-paying cars and Volvo tests autonomous parking cars, is the nightmare of mall parking over for us? Would you trust your own car to park itself? Email us and we'll publish your thoughts on Wheels24.

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