A survey by automotive research and consulting firm S&P Global Mobility found that Chinese consumers' interest in fully automated parking and their willingness to pay for it ranked almost at the top of the list of desired features, compared with American and German respondents. Is more. ,
This discrepancy points not only to the wide gap between countries' driving preferences, but also to the successes created by new automakers' focus on software development and automated features. Legacy manufacturers, meanwhile, appear to be playing catch-up.
when humans do it better
Car dealer Simmons says one explanation for the different attitudes towards parallel parking technology may be that Western automakers' facilities are not very good. “When you're stopped on a high road and parallel parking, and there's a line of cars behind you honking their horns, the self-parking system usually feels a little slow,” he says.
in one VideoPublished two years ago, Simons compared parallel parking systems TeslaModel S and 3, Audi e-tron gtford mustang Mach-Eand BMW i4 M50, and found that while Tesla's system was mostly disappointing, the others performed acceptable. But many of the systems they've tried have trouble detecting curbs, and tend to park too close or too far from the sidewalk. “Nothing I've tried so far has been consistently better than anyone else in any way,” he says.
Older, Western self-parking systems may have been influenced by automakers' old-school approach to building new facilities. For new manufacturers, including Tesla, BYDAnd xpengAutomated parallel parking is “part of the overall self-driving capability,” says Jeremy Carlson, who leads autonomous vehicle research at S&P Global Mobility. They start with car manufacturer software, and are willing to spend money to add additional sensors to enable more sophisticated parking performance. In contrast, other manufacturers have tended to build their features as separate parts, which can lead to rigidity. “Utility may be affected,” he says.
Former Ford engineer Greg Stevens, now research director, suggests that drivers may also be neglecting their smart-parking features because they don't trust the system. MCTA vehicle technology facility affiliated with the University of Michigan. Parallel parking requires maneuvering a big, heavy, expensive thing into a tight space close to other big, heavy, expensive things – and mistakes are costly. “Bridging that trust deficit has been a big issue,” says Stevens.
automation worship
By contrast, in urban China, the government has groomed a new class of middle-class drivers to embrace technology, including the facilities created by powerful domestic auto industryRegulators have given exemption to domestic auto companies approval to operate More highly automated systems on public roads, including fully autonomous vehicles.
A McKinsey report concluded that this demonstration had increased consumer enthusiasm for autonomous driving compared to other countries. one in 2021 survey According to the consultancy, 60 percent of Chinese respondents said they would likely buy a car that could only drive on the highway if the convenience was offered for less than $10,000, compared with 57 percent of American respondents and 36 percent of Germans. In.