Parking Apocalypse

I've never really understood or appreciated the importance of parking. It's probably because I travel too much and most of the time my car is sitting at home in my driveway. But I had occasion to confront the issue during a recent visit to Santa Monica - where parking is as essential as breathing and valets flit about the streets like fireflies.

I rented a fancy convertible because, after all, I was going to be in Santa Monica the capitol of the car capitol (Los Angeles - no, not Detroit!) of the most car obsessed corner (California) of the most car obsessed country (USA) in the world. While pulling up to my hotel right along the beach in Santa Monica, though, I immediately realized my error. Parking the car was going to cost me a ridiculous amount of money every day and parking was going to be a problem anywhere I wanted to visit in the area.

In fact, the hotel and the town (Santa Monica) clearly understand the parameters of this dilemma. The town has provided an electric shuttle bus for short trips and most places you'd want to go - the Pier, Venice Beach, etc. - are within walking distance. Why rent a car at all?

So, now I get it. Parking is a critical existential concern for car companies everywhere that are interested in perpetuating the culture of selling vehicles to individuals to be owned and driven. If you can't park it - easily, cheaply - why own it?

If you live anywhere in California or in Los Angeles in particular - actually anywhere in the world - and you own a car - you unconsciously plan your parking activity in advance. It's like breathing. You know exactly where you are going to leave your car if you intend to bring it with you.

It's different for visitors and tourists. Not being familiar with Santa Monica and the local parking protocols, I found I had committed myself to a daily dose of parking anxiety. My wife and I overcame this anxiety somewhat with a visit to the Petersen Automotive Museum where we were greeted by this quote from E.B. White:

Clearly, I am not the only one with car-related anxieties and fixations. The point is, if you don't know where you are going to keep or park your car you probably don't want to own or drive your car.

Car companies and entrepreneurs and inventors understand this which explains the obsessive pursuit of parking problem solvers and the emergence of Parkopedia as the mother of all parking applications. Parkopedia dominates the parking landscape from the perspective of partnerships with car makers, a partial list of which includes:

• BMW: global off-street
• Volvo: global (without China) off-street and payments
• JLR: global (without China, through HERE)
• Daimler: global (without China) off-street, apps and legacy Comand systems (through HERE)
• PSA: EU and NA off-street (through TomTom)
• Ford: global off-street and on-street (FordPass)
• GM: global (without China) off-street plus transactions
• Audi-China: off-street
• Mazda-China: off-street
• Toyota Europe: off-street 
• Honda Europe: off-street

But Parkopedia is not alone. The ongoing struggle to ensure that systems built-into cars provide for parking - including predictive parking availability and reservations - continues to spur innovation and product development. The list of parking app providers is long but is topped by ParkMobile, SpotHero, ParkMe, Spot Angels, and BestParking - among many others.

Car makers, led by the German OEMs, are particularly focused on this area with several adding the ability for their cars to scan streets for open parking spaces regardless of whether the vehicle in question needs a place to park. The idea is to share the information with other vehicles in the area should an open space be detected by vehicle sensors.

These car makers understand that in the long run it isn't so much the anxiety confronting tourists visiting Los Angeles that poses a problem, it's the long-term intention of cities to restrict or eliminate parking altogether that is putting pressure on the vehicle ownership proposition. In fact, cities around the world are not only restricting parking, they are increasingly designating parking spaces from the limited number available for shared vehicle parking.

All of this is by way of explaining that parking, as an application being built into cars, is the third most important application after traffic and weather - and for good reason. If you can't find a place to park your car, you're not going to want to drive your car and that is the existential crisis facing the automotive industry.

So adding parking anxiety to EV-related range anxiety and owning a car is suddenly starting to look like a syndrome. If so, Parkopedia probably has the cure for what ails you. And OPISNAVX can tell you whether there's a charging station there.

Roger C. Lanctot is Director, Automotive Connected Mobility in the Global Automotive Practice at Strategy Analytics. More details about Strategy Analytics can be found here: https://www.strategyanalytics.com/access-services/automotive#.VuGdXfkrKUk