Connected car finally may have found a parking spot

How did we ever live without GPS?

Before satellite navigation became common in cars and smartphones, drivers were forced to fumble with paper maps. Or leaf through printed-out directions from the Internet. Or stop and ask for directions. Every option was miserable compared with GPS.

Yet for all the progress in navigation, parking is still stuck in the bad old days.

Drivers headed to an unfamiliar neighborhood still must look for a parking lot ahead of time or run the risk of circling their destination in search of an affordable and available spot. It's a frustrating waste of time and fuel.

That's why it's such good news that parking is drawing a new level of attention from in-car navigation specialists such as Inrix, of Kirkland, Wash., which already taps into smartphone data to beam down cloud-based traffic updates to millions of cars.

"Parking is important to us," Bryan Mistele, the co-founder and CEO of Inrix, said in an interview this month. "We believe people will soon be able to not only know where garages are but how much they charge, and they'll be able to make reservations remotely."

This month, 11-year-old Inrix completed its acquisition of Santa Monica, Calif., startup ParkMe, which has assembled a parking database with 29 million spaces in 3,232 cities across 64 countries. Together, they plan to integrate parking into in-car navigation systems so drivers don't need to fend for themselves at the end of a trip.

Inrix and ParkMe started working together three years ago. Since then, they have launched services for Audi and Toyota that allow drivers to search for parking lots and compare prices on the navigation screen. This summer, Inrix demonstrated another feature in a BMW i3 that trawls through the company's database and shows customers the probability of finding a street parking spot on each surrounding block.

The next step is to let customers pay for a parking spot from their navigation screen. In the future, said Alex Israel, co-founder and COO of ParkMe, the companies may even be able to offer a dynamic pricing model like the one employed by Uber and Lyft, so customers pay more for a space in a parking lot at peak hours.

One challenge is connecting parking lots and cities to the cloud.

Parking is a fractured industry. In San Francisco alone, there are eight private companies with 10 or more parking lots listed on ParkMe. Smart parking meters on streets are a fantastic source of data, but they're still fairly uncommon. Plus, street parking nationwide is managed by tens of thousands of cities, each with its own policies.

ParkMe has learned that maintaining its database takes grunt work. Employees must place phone calls to ensure that the database is accurate. This is why Inrix is more interested in automatically tapping into data from smartphones and cars.

"If you move the gearshift into park, that's a parking event," Mistele said. "We'll upload that into the cloud. Mix that with the data we're getting from pay-by-phone parking, and over time, we view cloud-sourced data from vehicles and mobile devices as more important than going owner-to-owner with parking lots."

One experimental project at Inrix is using cameras and radar to sense available parking spaces. Several of Inrix's customers, such as Ford, offer automated parking systems that scan the roadside to detect open parking spots. By harnessing the power of cars, which are constantly moving around and trawling the world for data, Inrix hopes to spare the messy work of negotiating with thousands of companies and cities.

"The parking industry as a whole is really disparate," Israel said. "Whether you're parking in Los Angeles or Stuttgart, we want you to have the same experience."