Having worked on numerous projects over the years, we were forced to look at alternatives after existing automated car parking technology was continuously rejected by local City officials and traffic engineers due to slow parking/retrieval times when proposed for sites such as office blocks, where traffic peaks in the morning and afternoon. Car elevators are key in existing high-capacity automated car parking systems, unfortunately they also cause a bottleneck since they only handle one car at a time, no matter how quickly cars can be queued on the floors above.
As an example: in a 15-floor parking structure with 5 entry enclosures the following could be achieved when using our patented Vertical Vehicle Conveyor (VC):
- Our VC processes multiple cars at once:
- 15 floors = 16 cars on one VC, as opposed to only 1 car on a car elevator;
- 5 entrances x 16 cars = 80 cars on the 5 VCs, as opposed to 5 cars on the car elevators.
- Within seconds of driving a car out of the entry enclosure the VC drops down with another car to take its place;
- While a user gets into his/her car on Ground another can be added to the VC above.
Our proprietary software further speeds up parking/retrieval times:
- Cars can be stored according to usage patterns;
- AGV speeds increase;
- Pre-booking locates cars closer to Vertical Vehicle Conveyors, ensuring quicker retrieval once the driver arrives on site.
Video:
The following video shows the Vertical Vehicle Conveyor in the adjacent images (the VC description starts at 1:13):