Volvo has developed an ingenious concept for autonomous parking. The V40 concept car finds and parks in a vacant space by itself, without the driver inside, also interacting safely and smoothly with other cars and pedestrians in the car park.

“Autonomous Parking is a concept technology that relieves the driver of the time-consuming 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,” says Thomas Broberg, Senior Safety Advisor Volvo Car Group.The technology called Vehicle 2 Infrastructure uses transmitters in the road infrastructure, informs the driver when the service is available.

To use the service, driver picks the smart phone app to activate the Autonomous Parking and then walks away from the car.

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

“The autonomous parking and platooning technologies are still being developed. However, we will take the first steps towards our leadership aim by introducing the first features with autonomous steering in the all-new Volvo XC90, which will be revealed at the end of 2014,” concludes Thomas Broberg.