Inside a high-tech parking garage where robots valet park your car

Hidden inside a 46-story luxury condominium building in Miami is a massive garage where dozens of busy robots whisk cars to and from parking spots.

The futuristic 24/7 operation unfolds across a 13-level garage and employs five car lifts, dozens of lasers and hundreds of bar codes embedded in the floors. Residents who pull into one of the building’s five drive-up bays save the precious time of hunting for a spot, instead handing their vehicles off to robo-valets who park the cars for them.

This all goes down inside the Brickell House, home to roughly 375 condo residences and the largest and tallest automated parking system of its kind, according to ParkPlus, the company that built it. 

Automated parking is a growing trend in high-end real estate where buildings from New York to Miami now come equipped with kiosks, car lifts and car-parking robots. A coveted spot inside some luxury Manhattan condos can start at $300,000. Meanwhile, a real estate agent representing a five-bedroom penthouse at Brickell House told CNBC the $15 million asking price includes five parking spots in the sci-fi-like structure.

These modern parking amenities are part of the so-called smart parking market, which includes a wide range of solutions from automated parking to digital payment systems. According to Grand View Research, the global smart parking market was valued at $6.5 billion in 2021 and is projected to reach $30.16 billion by 2030, with a major share of that market in North America.

A representative at ParkPlus told CNBC that U.S. demand for cutting-edge automated systems, like the one at Brickell House, is mostly being driven by luxury residential projects in higher-density urban metros, while car dealerships, hospitals, hotels, parking facilities, private car collectors and private residences often opt for mechanical systems that are typically less advanced.

The Brickell House garage, which is off-limits to humans, is controlled by 29 robots also known as automated guidance vehicles, or AGVs for short. 

The AGVs are essentially free roaming, self-charging, robo-parkers that use vision systems, lifts and lasers to precisely park and retrieve cars. They’re 12 feet long and 4 feet wide, with a steel platform that sits just 10 inches above the floor.

Hidden underneath each of the powerful machines, which can carry cars up to 6,000 pounds, are eight wheels, bright flashing lights and an electronic eye that can read bar codes embedded in the floors for guidance. 

The nimble robots slide under a vehicle and appear to effortlessly carry it across floors and in and out of car lifts. They abide by a calculated division of labor: Some AGVs only move cars on and off the lifts, others are tasked with shuffling cars across floors and into spots. A vehicle that enters or exits the system might be handled by as many as three AGVs passing the car from one robo-colleague to another. 

And since there is no human that has to get in or out of the vehicle the parking can be very precise, squeezing vehicles into spots with just 2 inches between them.

During CNBC’s visit to the ParkPlus system, our team rigged a Ferrari 488 Spider with cameras and recorded the automated retrieval process. It traveled from the ninth level of the garage to a ground-floor bay in under four minutes.

According to ParkPlus, critical to the system’s operation and risk mitigation is rigorous testing: The robots have demonstrated they can move 15 vehicles in and out of the garage in rapid succession for 40 hours straight without a single hiccup.

The cost of an automated system like the one at Brickell House varies widely depending on the building, but Peter Manis, president of ParkPlus Florida, said the range is generally $20,000 to $80,000 per spot.

That cost is on top of what a developer has already spent to construct the building’s garage levels. Manis declined to reveal the exact price of the system installed at Brickell House, but a parking capacity of the garage’s size at Manis’ estimated cost range puts the pricing anywhere from $8 million and $32 million.

One of the main motivations for a building developer to pump millions into the automation of its parking garage is the system’s ability to maximize precious square footage. Manis told CNBC that in some cases an automated system can optimize square footage by up to three times better than an old-school garage.  

“You don’t have driving ramps, you don’t have turning, you don’t have two different lanes and you can squeeze them right next to each other,” said Manis.

Better-utilized space for parking could mean a developer needs fewer floors devoted to vehicles — freeing up square footage for residences and potentially boosting apartment sales.

With any new technology, there are naturally some early-stage pain points.

Billionaire Palmer Luckey, who founded the virtual reality company Oculus VR and military weapons maker Anduril Industries, filed a lawsuit earlier this year saying he got stuck inside his private garage elevator. 

Luckey bought and converted a Newport Beach, California, mansion into a multi-level garage equipped with an elevator and scissor lifts for his car collection. In the suit filed against Luckey’s builder and subcontractor, the billionaire said the elevator “repeatedly stopped its vertical motion without warning and trapped its occupants inside.”

According to the filing, the mansion-turned-garage is now unusable and Luckey incurred “millions of dollars in damages, with a precise amount that will be proven at trial.” 

In response, the builder’s attorney told CNBC his client has filed a cross complaint arguing the elevator and lifts were the responsibility of the specialized subcontractor, who Palmer personally approved to build the lifts. Meanwhile, the subcontractor filed a motion to strike the lawsuits claims and did not respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

Back in Miami, Brickell House has had its own headline-making parking nightmare. In 2016, long before the new AGV system was installed, the condo association filed a complaint against the building’s developer over a parking system it claimed never functioned properly. Residents’ cars were reportedly trapped in the system, which had been installed by a now-bankrupt parking company, and the garage was eventually shut down, leaving the building with no on-site parking for years, according to the lawsuit. 

“The failure of the [previous] system was the Achilles heel of our industry,” said Paul Bates, ParkPlus group president.

A jury awarded the condo association more than $40 million in damages, according to court documents. It remains one of the largest construction defect verdicts in Florida history.

The condominium association, which declined to discuss past litigation with CNBC, also reportedly received a $32 million insurance settlement over the system.

For Bates, the new ParkPlus system at Brickell House, installed beginning in 2022, helped close a dark chapter in automated parking.

“Brickell House, and these familiar concerns, have pushed the industry to innovate, improve system reliability, and focus on risk mitigation,” Bates said.