A friend recently showed me a picture of the Volkswagen Autostadt car storage and I thought it was a fake picture. Apparently in Volkswagen needed a way to store their cars after production. They realized that huge parking lots were not acceptable because they would require a large amount of space. This led to the development of the Autostadt. This is sort of like a large automatic car garage. The cars are automatically put into a compartment by the lift shown in the middle. When the car is needed a computer remembers its location and directs the lift to retrieve that car. I thought that this was a very interesting and innovative design for car storage. I wonder if there is any way we could implement something like this as a common parking garage. People could park their car on top of a lift and the car would be taken up into the tower. They could use a magnetic card much like the current design to have the machine retrieve their car for them. If this could be designed effectively it could eliminate the annoyance of driving around in circles looking for a parking space.
