Volkswagen Group, automotive, Wolfsburg, Germany

Autoblog gets a ride in a driverless car that parks itself all by itself developed by Volkswagen and Stanford.

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The Volkswagen Golf R Touch packs an array of high resolution screens, gesture sensing technology and capacitive buttons into the cabin. We go hands-on with its suite of experimental tech.

"Volkswagen Golf R Touch gesture controlExperimental interior hands-on impressions"

by Derek Fung
January 12, 2015

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In the future we may well drop our car off at the entrance to the shopping mall car park, and leave it to drive itself to a refueling point and then automatically park up to wait for our return. Sounds incredible? Not if German motor group VW has its way. But you will need an electric vehicle to take advantage of this kind of shop & charge valet service.

The company demonstrated their ultra high tech valet vision in Amsterdam recently, using a bunch of sci-fi technology, like wireless induction charging, an autonomous self-driving electric Golf and a fancy robot station. The first part, V-Charge, uses a wireless charging plate on the floor of the car park to charge up the vehicle automatically as it sits in a parking slot.

The car automatically drives into the parking slot and stops over the top of the charging plate, at which point charging starts going. It that's too slow for you, then you can use a faster charge method with the robot doing all the hard work, while you go grab a cafe latte or whatever.

It's all a bit too close to weird future robot-land for our liking.

More at
"VW Robot Car Charger – robot valet refuels your car while you shop"

by Nigel
July 18, 2015

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