Parking a car has just been elevated to a new level with BMW’s new “self-parking” prototype vehicle equipped with remote parking technology. It actually lets drivers stand beside their car while it parks itself perfectly into the garage. Sounds cool, doesn’t it? The prototype BMW Remote Park Assist system, revealed at the BMW Innovations Day in Munich, Germany last month, is designed for automatic garage parking. The driver providse parking instructions to the system through a central locking button on remote control. The car can then be reversed from the parking place while the driver is monitoring pedestrian traffic around the vehicle. This eliminates the risk of reversing into small children and pets.

The driver controls and supervises the car through a key fob and the vehicle moves at half-walking speed (2.5 km/h). The automatic parking process is made possible by the use of video cameras and sensors that detect the distance from obstacles. To avoid collisions, the driver can interrupt the parking process by simply releasing the button on the key fob.

The system lets the car park exactly in the middle of the space to allow maximum room to open the doors. And since everything is saved within the system’s computer; the car will maintain the same trajectory when leaving the garage and also stop at the same point where the driver started the parking maneuver. It even lets exterior mirrors fold automatically when parking and exiting. The BMW Parking Assist System is ideal for parking areas with restricted space such as in condos and apartments. This innovation is another proof of BMW’s leading edge when it comes to developing advanced and sophisticated automotive systems.

See BMW’s Remote Park Assist in action in this video: