Parking High Up

This saves valuable space in cities: With vertical parking, cars are parked on top of one another in a parking tower instead of side by side. Inside the tower, a rotating drive system moves the vehicles according to the Paternoster principle. Ball rotary joints from Rodriguez, the specialist in rotary products, play an important role in this process. 

Parking twelve cars in a space measuring seven by seven meters? It’s possible with Vertical Parking, or VePa for short. With Vertical Parking, as the name suggests, vehicles are parked on top of one another in a parking tower. This way, the space that would otherwise accommodate four cars can hold three times as many. 

Vertical Parking was developed by the startup of the same name, which emerged from the UnternehmerTUM incubator at the Technical University of Munich. Founders Simon Schubnell and David Schön drew inspiration from similar concepts in Asia and adapted them to German conditions.

Rotating Parking System

How should the tower be designed to be robust and weather-resistant, even at temperatures as low as -20 degrees? How will entry and exit be managed? And above all, how will the transport mechanism for the vehicles inside the tower be designed? At full capacity with twelve vehicles, a maximum total weight of 30 metric tons or more is to be expected. These were the questions posed by the two founders and their team. For technical details, they collaborated with industry partners; for the bearings in the transport system, they selected ball slewing rings from Rodriguez. Durability, minimal wear, and low maintenance requirements—these were the startup’s specifications.

Rodriguez was able to meet these requirements. “Thanks to our new design concepts and improved manufacturing processes, engineers can develop completely new ideas and solutions using our ball rotary joints,” emphasizes Product Manager Andreas Schön. As a specialist in rotary products, rolling bearings, and linear technology, Rodriguez offers a wide range of round and profile rail guides, ball and trapezoidal screw drives, as well as electric linear actuators and ball rollers. In addition to customized individual solutions, the company’s experts also develop complete linear systems with various drive options for demanding applications across different industrial sectors—from aerospace to special-purpose machine manufacturing.

Robust and Low-Friction

Ball swivel joints consist of an inner and an outer ring, with balls serving as rolling elements between them. This makes them particularly robust and capable of withstanding high axial or radial loads. At the same time, they exhibit exceptionally low friction losses. These two factors were decisive for their use in the VePa. Rodriguez’s ball rotary joints, which have proven themselves over many years, are also corrosion-resistant and available with inner diameters up to 30 mm and outer diameters up to 6,100 mm.

In the Vertical Parking system’s drive system, Rodriguez ball-type rotary joints now provide the necessary stability and enable the rotational movements of the drive units. In the parking tower, the vehicles are moved in so-called gondolas. Each gondola can carry up to 2.7 metric tons and is suspended from a robust, circulating chain driven by a powerful 30-kW motor.

Half with Charging Stations

After four years of development, Vertical Parking has now opened its first public parking tower in Munich’s Werksviertel-Mitte district. A private tower for a company in Munich-Freising was already launched in 2023. The VePa in the Werksviertel, near Munich’s Ostbahnhof, is open to all residents. You check in digitally and drive forward into the gondola. According to the operator, when retrieving your vehicle, it takes a maximum of 90 seconds for your car to be returned to you, at which point you can drive straight out.

A particular advantage of the Munich parking tower is that half of the gondolas are equipped with electric charging stations. This means that while the electric car is parked—and, if necessary, “moving” through the paternoster—its battery is being charged. Currently, 11-kW wall boxes are available for this purpose. The tower’s technical design could also make high-power HPC charging at 50 kW possible in the future, or even inductive charging in the long term.

Sustainability is very important to the founders, Simon Schubnell and David Schön. “Our shared goal is to make stationary traffic more efficient and to rethink urban space,” they say. Because of its small footprint, other areas that would otherwise be cluttered with parked cars could be freed up and put to ecological use. Alternatively, the freed-up space could also be used for much-needed inner-city housing. Unlike an underground parking garage, for example, the parking tower also eliminates the need for expensive and complex civil engineering work and can be easily dismantled or rebuilt at another location.

Potential: 40 Towers in Munich

According to the company, this is Europe’s first public parking tower with charging infrastructure, and the two founders hope many more will follow. The next one is already planned for a central location in Berlin, at Hackescher Markt in the Mitte district. And in Munich alone, according to David Schön, there is potential for 35 to 40 more of these parking towers.

Unlike parking towers in Asia—which served as models and are often bare steel frameworks—the Vertical Parking Tower in Munich is clad in wooden elements, and some of its surfaces feature artistic designs. The design by Munich-based artist Mariella Kerscher depicts two intertwined umbilical cords, which, according to the artist, are intended to embody a feminine symbol in contrast to the car, which has masculine connotations. For future projects, cladding with perforated metal sheets or greening a tower is also conceivable—that would then be vertical gardening combined with vertical parking.

Images: Rodriguez GmbH, VePa Vertical Parking GmbH