London Gatwick has launched a robotic airport parking service

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• Hacker News
• 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.
  by matthewpick
• That's the value change right? You can park more densely as no one needs to get in our out of the vehicle.
  by znkynz
• A sci-fi dream i have is that cars and their engines decouple. That you just own a shell, an egg, and the town owns all the engines. (This dream also includes warehouses and delivery robots of many sizes owned by the town too).

  In a funny way, this sort of does that. Sure your car still has an engine but this very much is the car-shell tractor, in practice. This is really neat to see.

  I wish them luck. I hope it is reliable enough! It looks pretty straightforwards in how it picks up wheels, which is neat.

  by jauntywundrkind
• Having been to Gatwick plenty of times, the weakness with this vs the already existing valet parking is that the valet parking is just 1 story of the short stay car park.

  You just drive up, drop your keys and go, your car is parked in a long line of cars that they can asynchronously drive off to long stay. The key thing is the location - you're a 30 second walk over a bridge into the terminal. Probably a hundred cars can be sitting waiting to be driven off to the long stay at the time, so they can handle the drop off/pick up of many cars at once. Whereas with this solution each "bay" will be occupied for a time while the autonomous robot drives off the previous vehicle, so you either need to over-provision - have many robots servicing a single bay to cope with peak times, or you'll need some local skid buffer.

  From a customer point of view. This is on the outskirts of the airport so it's a much longer walk without a covered path (so you'll get wet because at some point it will start raining again in the UK). It's maybe slightly better than long stay, where you do need a bus journey (which tbh isn't that bad). But I'm not sure how much juice is in this application to squeeze.

  by Traster
• Presumably this robotic valet will shift more towards long-term parking distant from the airport when it's known a customer is not returning. Today that's presumably cost ineffective.
  by peder
• 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.
  by smnscu
• IMO this would be a terrible idea to let the robots park cars in the same car park as humans. They most likely have a dedicated car park for this where ever car is parked by a robot.

  The article says:

  "A Stanley Robotics autonomous parking robot then slides underneath the vehicle, lifts it by its tyres and transports it to a secure storage area."

  Which seems to suggest this.

  by alt227
• The local car wash has lights that help you park the car pretty precisely under the wash robot. No rails or anything, you park right underneath the robot and it moves around and over the car. The robot doesn't start until you are in position.
  by throw2ih020
• https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jul/26/water-supply...

  As long as you don't want to use the toilet.

  by rwmj
• More fun to spend millions on AI than fixing literal shit.
  by ukrulez
• Seems it's becoming all too frequent in Kent and Sussex
  by gib444
• It's the perfect juxtaposition of stories.
  by flkiwi
• 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.
  by walthamstow
• Wow, who is subsidizing it?
  by tehwebguy
• That is pretty good pricing. I’m surprised. I wonder if this is just introductory pricing. It seems like there’s not much throughput for something like this. I can’t see how this could handle a constant stream of people wanting to park their cars.
  by sixQuarks
• "Unlike traditional valet parking, passengers retain possession of their keys throughout their trip."

  "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?

  by ajay-b
• First thing I thought, too. Seems like mutually exclusive features.
  by cortesoft
• I can remote lock/unlock my car from an app, so I’m guessing this is what they are thinking about.
  by mbreese
• You give them the keys, then they go to the site to collect your item.
  by beejiu
• 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.

  by djhworld
• 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.

  by saghm
• Pretty sure the alarm cares more about tilt than vibration - indicates towing
  by Havoc
• 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!
  by fsuts
• I don't think car alarms detect these kinds of vibrations. It's specifically tilt and more impactful stuff. Certainly, the alarm is never going off when I get my car back via the lifts that I've used. It's probably too smooth.
  by 0x3f
• 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.
  by PaulRobinson
• I am quite surprised by the amount of negative comments here. My immediate reaction after watching the video is that this is pretty cool and I want to try it, even though I expect issues given that it is the first service of this kind in London.
  by longsangstan
• Replacing "hand over your keys" with "perform detailed inspection of your vehicle, including undercarriage and suspension for damage before leaving" doesn't sound particularly enticing. Given I'm capable of parking my own vehicle without having an anxiety attack in the process I'm also fairly certain this thing doesn't solve any of my problems. I am likewise surprised that this seemingly pointless, grossly overengineered system that is nakedly hostile to minimum wage tier workers like valet service drivers isn't being warmly received here, but for different reasons.
  by forgetfreeman
• Personally I wonder why didn't they put several Pater Noster parking machines instead.

  Systems with eight slots have decent throughout, the same density as cars parked side-by-side and bumper-to-bumper - even including the space needed to roll out - and are mechanically simple compared to just about anything else in this space.

  by Tade0
• Simultaneously - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jul/26/water-supply...
  by jalada
• It’s exciting to invest in the future and not exciting to invest in infrastructure
  by kylehotchkiss