LOS ANGELES — The high-end InterContinental hotel in downtown Los Angeles sees its fair share of Mercedes, but the EQS sedan driving around its parking garage last week was an anomaly. It wheeled into the lot and parked itself without a human behind the wheel.
“One stress factor for today’s driving is trying to find a parking spot, and once you’ve found that parking spot, to maneuver into a tight space,” said Kaj Stepper, senior vice president for automated driving at Robert Bosch, LLC.
The Germany electronics company designed the automated valet parking system demonstrated at the Intercontinental, using Mercedes’ new fully electric flagship sedan.
Stepper said Bosch developed its automated valet to make people feel comfortable with self-driving technology “step by step, not one big step in one big revolution.” Fully self-driving cars have been in the works for the past decade and are still years away from reality in personal vehicles, but multiple studies have shown consumers distrust the technology.
A recent survey from the American Automobile Assn. found that just 14% of drivers would trust riding in a vehicle without a human controlling it, while 54% said they would be afraid to ride in such a vehicle.
With a starting price of $103,360, it’s easy to understand why an EQS owner would want to make sure it isn’t scraped or scuffed doing something as mundane as parking. During Thursday’s demonstration at the InterContinental, it was also a mark of faith that Mercedes believes in Bosch’s technology.
Exiting the car at the garage entrance, the EQS driver used the Mercedes Me app on his cellphone to request that it be parked. He tapped the screen, the car’s lights flashed and it started to roll toward its destination without anyone inside.
While the EQS has cameras, ultrasonic sensors and other technologies that form the building blocks of a truly self-driving vehicle, it is not a fully autonomous car capable of driving without a human on its own. Its automated valet parking feature uses external infrastructure to control it.
A series of lidar pillars were set up along the hotel parking garage drive route every 20 feet or so to help guide the EQS into its space. A laser scanning technology, lidar calculates how long it takes a beam of light to hit an object and reflect back to the scanner. That helps it calculate distances so it can sense if something is in the car’s way that needs to be avoided and where there are open parking spots.
The automated valet needs the car it’s controlling to have an automatic transmission, electronic stability control, electric power braking, electric power steering and a communication device, such as Wi-Fi. It’s the Wi-Fi that communicates with the lidar to guide the vehicle.
Bosch has demonstrated its automated valet parking system for real estate developers in Detroit and in urban centers in China, but its demo at the InterContinental in LA was its first in a hotel setting.
“The automated valet benefits the consumer, number one, but there’s also benefits for several other parties,” Stepper said. “It also benefits real estate developers and the automakers.”
Partnering with car companies and property owners, he said, will help the technology scale and get to market more quickly.
Currently, the technology is only commercially available in one place and with one car: the airport in Stuttgart, Germany, and the Mercedes S class sedan. Mercedes-Benz is headquartered in Stuttgart, and Bosch is based just 10 miles away.
“What do you associate with Mercedes? It’s luxury and safety,” Mercedes-Benz Research and Development North America President Philipp Skogstad said at the InterContinental. “What we’ve put together here is a system that allows you to come here, drop your car off and pursue other activities — to get your time back. That is how we define luxury.”
In the future, Bosch sees automated valet technology having a variety of uses beyond benefiting drivers who hate parking. It could automatically move electric vehicles from charging stations when they have finished refueling. Rental car companies could also use it to bring a vehicle directly to a customer instead of having a driver get the car himself.