Bosch and Mercedes-Benz have announced that Germany’s Federal Motor Transport Authority has approved their highly automated parking system for use in the P6 parking garage run by APCOA at Stuttgart Airport. 

It will be the world’s first highly automated driverless parking function to SAE Level 4 to be officially approved for commercial use and means drivers will no longer have the inconvenience of time spent looking for a parking space and maneuvoring in tight parking garages.

“Driverless parking is a key aspect of automated mobility. The highly automated parking system we developed together with our partner Mercedes-Benz shows just how far we’ve already progressed along this development path. It will be with driverless parking that everyday automated driving will start,” says Dr. Markus Heyn, member of the Bosch board of management and chairman of the Mobility Solutions business sector. “From the outset, Bosch has taken the approach of making the infrastructure in parking garages intelligent. Accordingly, we have set standards in this area. In the future, our aim is to equip more and more parking garages with the necessary infrastructure technology, we plan to do several hundred of them worldwide in the next few years.”

A motorist can drive in to the parking garage, get out, and send the vehicle to a parking space just by tapping in a smartphone app. Once the driver has left the parking garage, the vehicle drives itself to its assigned space and parks. Later, the vehicle returns to the pick-up point in exactly the same way. This process relies on the interplay between the intelligent infrastructure supplied by Bosch and installed in the parking garage and Mercedes-Benz automotive technology. Bosch sensors in the parking garage monitor the driving corridor and its surroundings and provide the information needed to guide the vehicle. In this way, vehicles can even drive themselves up and down ramps to move between stories. 

The companies plan to gradually roll out the driverless parking service in the APCOA P6 parking garage at Stuttgart Airport. From the day it is released for operation, the first customers with S-Class and EQS models built since July 2022 whose vehicle variants feature the INTELLIGENT PARK PILOT2 service as part of Mercedes me connect, and who have activated this service, will be able to use the function.