Pick Up Your New Car from the World’s Fastest Automatic Parking System

By: | January 17th, 2014

Autostadt Car Towers has made it into the 2014 Book of Guinness World Records as the “fastest automatic parking system in the world.” AutoStadt (Car City) is a massive car museum adjacent to the Volkswagen Factory in Wolfsburg, Germany.

One of the major attractions at AutoStadt is the two gleaming car parking towers. They are used to temporarily park new Volkswagen cars, automatically moved from the Wolfsburg plant next door after manufacturing.

The 16-floor towers are made of glass and galvanized steel. Each 48 meter tall silo can hold up to 400 cars. Both the towers are connected to the Volkswagen factory by a 700 meter underground tunnel. Newly-manufactured cars from the manufacturing plant are rolled over to these towers’ basement using a robotic-pallet system mounted on rail transports.

Once a car reaches the towers’ basement, it is lifted by a mechanical arm and moved to a bay. Each lift services 180° of the silo and moves at a speed of 2 meters per second. This makes this fully-automated high-rise parking system the fastest in the world.

When a customer purchases a car from Autostadt, the car is picked by a car shuttle from the silo and brought to the customer from these parking towers, without having driven even a single meter and the odometer still reading ‘0’.

Volkswagen sells over 500 cars a day from here. Around 37% of new VW buyers from Germany pick up their new vehicle from Wolfsburg.

Nidhi Goyal

Nidhi is a gold medalist Post Graduate in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences.

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