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Comment by hdgvhicv | Hacker News Reader

Robotic parking but not charging as part of it seems odd.

The trays that hold cars are either passed between different rails or rotated around like a paternoster lift(the Prague city hall weird elevator thing). It's just incompatible with the concept of a cable, and a third rail or giant bus bar docking plug upgrades for those systems would be too costly and risky.

Maybe that might have happened already if Japan was as insane as it was in 1995, but it just costs too much right now.

You’d think they could have a connector which lined up fairly easily when storing them and building a new one. Have a standard 30kW supply which automatically plugs in, then powers an on ramp charger. Not every ramp/spec would need the electic, only cars that need charging.

Indeed this seems to be an available product:

https://www.ip2.co.jp/parking/kikaishiki/products/ev-chargin...

https://www.tokyo-gas.co.jp/news/topics/20220930-04.html

With this being a retrofit

https://www.mhi.com/jp/news/1101285025.html

So it just seems to be a commercial question of demand rather than a technical question of feasibility.

Yeah, they do exist but IIUC, real world deployments are rare. I totally forgot about this when writing the original comment, but a lot of these systems can't take many SUVs and all Tesla vehicles(including Model 3) mainly due to width and also to height. Maybe that is a compounding factor for rarity of those upgrades.

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