There's nothing quite as demoralising as driving endlessly around a packed multi-storey car park desperately trying to find a space.
There's the agony of thinking you've found a spot only to realise there's a Fiat 500 in it which was completely obscured by the Range Rover parked next to it. Then there's the expletive-inducing trauma of finding a genuine bona-fide vacant space only to watch the car in front of you take it.
Mercifully, however, this could all be a thing of the past as Volvo has developed a new system which allows cars to park themselves. However, unlike the self-parking systems we've already seen, Volvo's new system is not purely a parallel parking aid. No, it's much cleverer than that.
The idea is that when you get to the multi-storey car park, you get out of the car and go shopping, or whatever it is that you do when you go to a multi-storey car park. The car, meanwhile, drives off and finds its own parking space, removing you from the tedious process of parking.
The system is activated via a smartphone app. The driver simply uses the app to initiate the self-parking system and walks away from the car. The vehicle then uses sensors to locate a free parking space.
And when you've finished shopping, you simply come back to the car park and the car will return to where you left it, ready for you to get back in and drive off.
The technology is still just a concept and it won't be available in the next few years; however, Volvo will take another step closer to the implementation of the system when it introduces self-steering on the new XC90 later this year.
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