I climbed inside a giant robotic parking garage

I'm a bit worried that this comes across as an advert. It's not — I reached out to the team at GIKEN, they had no editorial control, and no money changed hands. (Although they did, of course, go through all the paperwork required to let me climb into their giant robot parking garage.)

Can we just spare a second and talk how insanly FAST this thing moves with 2Tons parked on it?

Ooooo i like the slide out rall bits that deploy the car, will put the in the note book for my underground carpark

You didn't mention this, but I noticed in the final images, that they turn the car around when retrieving it, so you just have to pull forward to exit. I've felt for a while that the reversing we do in car parks is one of the most dangerous parts of parking. People and cars are moving around you, and it is hard to see.

Hearing Tom mumble "arigato gozaimasu" when they clipped the safety harness for him was really something special.

Imagine your dad parks the car forgetting that you're napping in the backseat and you wake up in the minivan backrooms.

I love how the concept goes from interesting to cool to holy heck he’s climbing up inside a massive multi car battery

That’s the most British “Arigato gosaimas” I’ve ever heard. Also, I always wanted the concept of valley parking to go obsolete. Also, loved the video. Thanks for keeping them coming Tom :)

Tom really squeezed the most out of his vacation work trip to Japan to give us a look at so many interesting things there.

What's most astounding to me is the speed and precision. Usually machines of this scale are only ever seen working this fast and efficiently in movies. I'd fully expect this platform to slow down to a crawl shortly before getting all the way down or up or even when turning.

We definitely could use one of those bike ones here in the Netherlands! Everyone has a bike and sometimes even multiple and in the bigger cities they have become such a nuisance. They're in the way, they are dumped in the canals, stolen or just simply left abandoned. A garage like this would be such a great way to solve it!

I would love to see the bike vaults at universities and event centres out here in Canada. Theft and damage is a genuine issue!

The one for bikes looks awesome. To be able to securly store your bike, without needing to carry a heavy lock with you is amazing. Train stations and apartment buildings everywhere should have these

This one was a LOT of fun to film! A lot of ladders, a lot of harnesses and a lot of fearing for my life as we stood inside these amazing machines while they operated.

having worked around heavy machinery even with guarding, terrifying is a fairly tame word to describe how scary where Tom stood was. There were probably very few if any safety features where he was and that lift wouldnt think twice about taking an arm.

As Japan is around 70% mountainous, they're ingenious solutions to saving space have amazed me for years 😀. Just one of the many reasons why I love Japan

This really does sound like a good alternative to parking lots considering how much space the latter actually uses up

There was one of these automatic car parking garages here in central Stockholm for 15+ years, P-Snurran. It shut down in 2019 after an electrical malfunction caused a load of cars to be stuck inside for several months until they could fix it. A mixture of difficulty in getting spare parts from the Italian parent company and a massive breakdown in trust from angry car owners led to it never reopening afterwards.

The far more common design all over urban Japan (including the condo building where I live) is "tower parking", which is a tall square tower, where I'm told the cars rotate through it like a vertical carousel. (I've only seen them from the outside, but they are so narrow, that seems like the only possible way it could work.) But it is FAR slower than this unless your car happens to be close to the bottom when you ask for it. So although this spoked arrangement takes more space, every car can be accessed without moving any others, making it fast. It would be like choosing a specific song on a CD or record vs. on a cassette tape.

Bicycle version was by far the most interesting, wish I got to see more of how that mechanism worked.