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Waze will soon help you find parking garages and zip through roundabouts
Google’s Waze is adding some quality-of-life navigation features in the coming weeks and months. New options can help you find parking garages, alert you when the speed limit is about to decrease and guide you through roundabouts.
Tesla's congestion fee bills $1 a minute to charge your car past 90 percent
Tesla's Supercharger idle fees will roll out globally, while congestion fees will specifically be implemented in the US.
Recommended Reading: The environmental cost of China's EV boom
Recommended Reading highlights the week's best writing on technology and more.
Lyft's app now lets you reserve and pay for a parking spot
Lyft now lets driver's search, reserve and pay for a parking spot on its app.
Google is simplifying how developers build Android for Cars apps
There’s a simpler way to make apps work on both Android Auto and Android Automotive.
Google Maps now lets you pay for parking and travel tickets inside the app
Google is giving you the option to pay for parking and transit from within Maps.
Tesla will offer a bird's eye parking view, if you pay a premium
Tesla is promising a bird's eye view to help with parking, but you'll need to order the Full Self-Driving package to use it.
Your EV's electricity can pay for parking at Nissan's new exhibition
Nissan's new exhibition lets you pay for parking with electricity from your EV -- something that could be commonplace in the future.
Y2K-type glitch is causing NYC parking meters to reject credit cards
A software glitch is causing parking meters throughout New York City to reject credit and prepaid parking cards, The New York Times reports. The payment software was set to expire on January 1st, and the vendor reportedly failed to update the software before the new year. So, at the stroke of midnight Wednesday, the city rang in a bug reminiscent of those feared around Y2K, which predicted computer systems would crash.
Daimler and Bosch inch closer to fully automated, self-driving valet service
Daimler has plans for self-driving trucks, autonomous taxis and cars that drive themselves on the autobahn. Now, it's moving forward with its vision to bring fully automated, driverless parking to the Mercedes-Benz Museum parking garage in Stuttgart, Germany. The system, a joint effort with Bosch, will allow visitors to park their autonomous vehicles with a few taps of an app.
Tesla's parking lot Summon upgrade arrives in the US next week
Tesla is ready to bring its parking lot-savvy Summon upgrade to its cars in earnest. Elon Musk has revealed that Enhanced Summon will be widely available in the US next week to Tesla owners who sprung for either the Enhanced Autopilot or Full Self-Driving packages. Tap a button in the Tesla mobile app and your EV can drive to you, saving you the trouble of walking to the far end of the lot. You can either have it drive to your current location or to a specific pin.
Avis makes it easier to find a parking spot for your car rental
Driving in an unfamiliar city can be stressful, and finding parking is even worse. Eventually, we'll have autonomous vehicles to deal with that for us, but until then, companies are looking at ways to ease the strain. That's why car rental brand Avis has partnered with mobility solutions company Arrive to add a space-finding feature to its app. The Avis app already lets drivers rent a car on the go, and includes a bunch of other helpful features such as remote car locking -- with Arrive integration customers in the US can now instantly find, book and pre-pay for parking. Arrive is already used in some 230 cities around Canada and the US, predominantly by third-party and business customers. Encouraging consumer use makes sense, especially as many city-dwellers don't drive a car on a daily basis -- knowing parking is already taken car of is just one less thing to worry about when you're behind the wheel.
Robot valets are parking cars at an airport in France
After a few years of testing its robot valets, Stanley Robotics will officially put its fleet to use at France's Lyon-Saint-Exupéry airport this week. If you plan to park in the robot-lot anytime soon, you'll leave your car in a special garage-like box. One of Stanley's robots will literally pick up your car and deliver it to a spot. When you return, the system will use your flight information to determine when to bring your car back to a box, where you can pick it up and drive off. As the company says, that should mean no waiting or searching the parking lot.
Chevrolet finally adds ‘find my car’ to its app
Chevrolet is adding a "vehicle locate" feature to its mobile app that lets you, and up to 10 designated people, pinpoint your car's whereabouts. Though it doesn't offer constant tracking in the vein of Tesla's always-on GPS or Uber's Trip Tracker, it could still be handy if you forget where you parked or to keep tabs on loved ones. Unless, of course, you already use Google Maps or Apple Maps to save your parking spot or a third-party GPS tracker as an extra means of security. Just update the myChevrolet app and you'll see a new tile for the option, which is compatible with Chevys dating back to 2012 and comes bundled with the Remote Access Plan. Then you can set it up to notify up to 10 people when your vehicle either enters or leaves a designated boundary area (aka a geofence). This custom zone can be as wide as a 20-mile radius or as small as a specific address. Each person you choose to receive alerts will have to opt-in first. The mobile app feature replaces the solely web-based Family Link option powered by GM's OnStar in-vehicle safety system.
US regulators approve BMW-Daimler services merger
BMW and Daimler's plan to combine their transportation services, including car sharing, ride hailing and electric vehicle charging, is a step closer to reality after US antitrust officials approved the partnership. The companies hope to close the deal by January 31st, and plan to reveal more details of their joint venture by the end of March.
Pop-up EV charger disappears when it's not being used
Electric vehicles face a lot of challenges in the push for mainstream adoption, and the proximity to domestic charging points is one of them. No problems there if you've got a driveway where you can install a charger, but for those living in built-up areas where on-street parking is the only option, getting an EV is all but out of the question. Enter Urban Electric, a company that's developed EV charging points that literally pop out of the ground.
VW will debut cars with autonomous parking in 2020
Automakers are fond of experimenting with self-parking cars, but VW intends to make it a practical reality. It's promising that vehicles in the company group (which includes brands like Audi, Bentley, Porsche and Lamborghini) will start including autonomous parking as of 2020. The system will only be available in "selected" parking garages at first, but it relies on pictorial guiding markers that are theoretically usable in any garage.
BMW and Daimler will combine their transportation services
If it seems ridiculous that virtually every major car manufacturer has its own suite of transportation services, you're not alone. BMW and Daimler have announced a plan to combine their mobility services in a 50/50 joint venture. Car2Go and DriveNow/ReachNow will unite their car sharing efforts, for example, while ChargeNow and Digital Charging Solutions would team up on EV power. Ride hailing, parking are also part of the proposed union.
Jaguar Land Rover tests autonomous parking on public roads
Plenty of cars will help you park, but the biggest challenge is frequently finding a spot in the first place -- it's no fun to circle the parking lot for 10 minutes. Fully autonomous cars can ultimately take care of this, but Jaguar Land Rover is demonstrating a feature that would help in the meantime. It recently expanded its public semi-autonomous testing in the UK to include a "self-driving valet" where vehicles both find open spaces and park themselves. The company pitches it as eliminating some of the drudgery of driving, letting you take the wheel when you'd genuinely enjoy it.
BMW buys a parking app in hopes of tackling urban traffic
Automakers increasingly see parking as the next great frontier, and BMW is no exception. It just bought Parkmobile, which it says is the largest mobile parking services provider in North America. This isn't BMW's first parking initiative, but it promises to help the German brand craft a parking offering it can market around the world. And notably, this isn't just about finding a way to profit beyond selling cars -- if you ask BMW, it's about solving traffic woes.
