It's quite reasonably priced too (for airport parking), about £80 a week booking for September today. I paid that for short stay parking at Stansted earlier this summer.
I'd be curious how it handles someone parking poorly in that bay e.g. diagonally. Presumably those lines serve as a parking guide and the door won't close unless you park correctly.
I remember parking in central London where you left your car in a single space inside a building and it would whisk it up onto some unseen location. I think that was under human control but maybe it will make a comeback with automation.
As a general rule, you should take the train to Gatwick if you can, but this is reasonably priced and next time I'm flying from Gatwick I'll probably drive and do this - the train route for me is a bit fiddly, and the worst bit of any London airport for a local is long-stay parking. I'm much closer to Heathrow but the flights from LGW are so much cheaper, it more than covers two weeks of parking at this price.
> The service must be booked in advance. Same-day drive-up parking is not available.
Interesting, I wonder if this is just a "Like to be able to see availability and cross-reference data to set individual pricing" or if it's because of a technical limitation, and if so, what could that possibly be?
So I'll have to park my car in a garage first, then take a bus to the terminal just so that a robot can move my car from the place where I parked it to a different place? I was hoping it'd be something where I'd pull up to the curb, grab my bags and head in while the robot parked the car for me but apparently I'll still have to take a bus to the terminal?
Well that’s the design / usability / real needs part. Which is what these projects often miss. I see often tech replacing parts of a workflow but in reality the process / flow remains the same. Now some parts are digital and we call this “progress”. Strictly speaking it’s digitization but not progress.
I always wonder with solutions like these how stuff like alarm systems on the car cope with the car being lifted, the vibrations encountered as its being towed.
Unless they tell you to switch the alarm system off I guess.
I asked this once in the past, but...do car alarms actually stop any actual crime ever? My entire life, every time I've ever heard a car alarm go off, literally everyone around just rolls their eyes and ignores it. If I actually looked up at a car alarm and the person outside the car just said "I'm so sorry! You know how it is", I would probably just nod and move on without really taking the time to figure out if it was really their car (because even if they were breaking in I don't have any desire to risk an altercation with someone doing that, and even if I were inclined to call law enforcement, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't come do anything because some random car's alarm is going off).
I want to be open minded that I'm missing something, but I can't help but feel like car alarms are just security theater with a side of nose pollution.
Illegally parked Cars are regularly lifted up and put into the back of flatbed lorries or towed away on back two wheels so this is arguably more gentle!
I wonder what the failure mode for something like this is (e.g. in bad weather, after a power cut, a car catches fire, etc). Nobody in the country with keys, cars parked so close together you probably couldn't get in anyway... could be interesting!
There are systems where you park your car on a moving platform and the whole platform slots into an underground warehouse. That seems simpler and safer.
You could pack the cars so close together that no one could get into them. Could be seen as a bit of a theft deterrent, although I’m sure the car park itself is pretty secure.
Great, now let's (gradually) get rid of all surface parking lots and build hyper-optimized multi-floor parking setups not made for human driving. A sort of Ocado Grocery Warehouse [1] for cars.
As far as I understand, first one Ocado robot went on fire, it doesn't have a sensor for fire so it kept going. Neither do its neighbours, who pass right by it and catch fire themselves. And so it keeps going until everything is on fire.
I guess we can add this to the ever-growing list of extremely expensive, complicated, inefficient and convoluted solutions to problems that end with the final specification: "but it can't be a train".
I heard horror stories, where "secure storage area" was actually a field without any security. Not saying this is the case here, but one must be mad to give a car like that without knowing exact location it is going.
It's one of the things where I can't see what is there robot's role here.
Of all the airports to do it at in the UK this is probably the one that doesn’t need it. Parking at Gatwick is a breeze, lots of options close and far from the airport and quite reasonably priced. Now Luton, that’s another story.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 57.3 ms ] threadInteresting, I wonder if this is just a "Like to be able to see availability and cross-reference data to set individual pricing" or if it's because of a technical limitation, and if so, what could that possibly be?
1 - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jul/26/water-supply...
Unless they tell you to switch the alarm system off I guess.
I want to be open minded that I'm missing something, but I can't help but feel like car alarms are just security theater with a side of nose pollution.
"If passengers accidentally leave an essential item in the vehicle after drop-off, on-site staff will be available to retrieve emergency items."
But.. how would they get that emergency item if they don't have the keys?
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE
As always, yes I know this already exists in Japan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQQlREtqAM8
As far as I understand, first one Ocado robot went on fire, it doesn't have a sensor for fire so it kept going. Neither do its neighbours, who pass right by it and catch fire themselves. And so it keeps going until everything is on fire.
As long as you don't want to use the toilet.
Tom Scott perhaps? Though he will likely get full access to the system.
Do you people even ride trains? Are you OK with the 50/50 odds of gettings home on time?
It's one of the things where I can't see what is there robot's role here.