Silky burl wood, buttery leather, voluptuous curves, rear seats that rival a Swedish masseuse. These things all come to mind when one gazes upon the brand new Lexus LS460. This super-luxo boat is loaded with creature comforts galore and utilizes the automotive industry’s most advanced technologies. With over a dozen speakers, heated and cooled seats, an optional mini-fridge, and of course a state of the art navigation system, what else could Lexus possibly throw into this swanky vehicle? The answer is a self-parking feature. For the first time in the history of consumer automobiles, a mass produced vehicle now has the ability to assist the driver in parallel and perpendicular parking. Notice the italicized word in the previous sentence, when one hears self-parking, they immediately think: press a button, sit back, check your email, etc and voila, perfect parallel parking job. However, this is unfortunately not the case. The system merely adjusts the steering column, thus the driver must ride the brake and simultaneously watch for small children, poodles, other cars etc. Now don’t get me wrong, this is an insanely cool feature, however, just how practical is it? Let’s find out.

Here is a scenario: you’re on your way to a Broadway show, let’s say Spamalot. You just picked up a few of your friends in your brand new Lexus, and since you aren’t already bragging enough, you decide to show off the self-parking feature as soon as you find a spot. Bingo, a nice-sized crevace opens in the wall of hastily parked automobiles. You swoop in for the kill, align yourself with the car in front of the spot, and shift into reverse. Now let us freeze time for just a moment here, you have two choices, you can parallel park your $80,000+ car manually in about 15-20 seconds, like you barely did on your drivers test, or you could let the computer do it for you. Choosing the latter of two options, the space-time continuum is restored and you notice that a view of the rear of the vehicle presents itself with a few colorful boxes, a flag, and some directional buttons. You hit the parallel park button, and move around the red box that represents the spot until it turns green and press ok. Incase you hadn’t noticed, by now there is a discordant symphony of raging car horns and a small sea of angry New Yorkers. No sweat, you’re almost done. So with your foot on the brake, you gently release pressure and the car lurches backward, but hey look at that, the steering wheel is moving itself, cool! After some more brake pumping, you have gently shimmied your way in between the two vehicles. But you’re not done yet, you still have to shift the car into drive, and pull up to even out the space between you and the other vehicles. This present juncture in time is about 1 minute and 30 seconds after you were initially faced with the decision between manu-park and self-park. Thoroughly impressed, your friends get out of the car, and you enjoy the show. On the way back to the car, for some reason you can’t help but wonder “What… is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?”

So what cutting-edge technology was required to design and implement such a groundbreaking option? Let’s discuss how it works. Most luxury/upscale vehicles include sonar sensors on the rear bumpers in order to facilitate manual parking. The sensors emit sound waves and measure the amount of time until the sound bounces back from an approaching object; as the vehicle nears an obstacle, the time delay between sound “blips” decreases and eventually sets off an alarm in the cabin to alert the driver. The LS460 also includes two sensors on the front bumper to maintain an “idea” of objects around the car. The intuitive parking system ties together the various sensors and the backup camera in order to maximize the amount of information that is fed into the system. The computer processor analyzes the image with programming algorithms and promptly calculates the optimal steering angles. This data is then fed into the electric power steering system while the throttle is manually controlled by the driver. An electrical engineers heaven!

Ideally in the future, consumer vehicles will be able to park themselves without driver input and require the same amount of time as a manual parking job. Hopefully sometime soon!

Video Link: http://youtube.com/watch?v=p4kBbIOZaGE

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