These Vehicles Have Been Trapped In A 'Robot Car Park' For 15 Years
We’ve all seen videos of those clever, automated car parks at work, haven’t we? You know the sort - you’ll park up in a special cradle-like device, which will then whisk your car off to be ‘stacked’ with hundreds of others, bringing it right back to you upon your return. If you’ve ever wondered why there aren’t more of these space-efficient facilities around, the answer is simple: they’re enormously complex and can be perilously expensive to run.
One company found this out after building a 600-space ‘robot car park’ in Edinburgh just after the start of the new millennium. Autosafe SkyPark opened in 2001, and was at the time described as the UK’s “most technologically advanced car park,” only to close down in 2003 when the operating company went into receivership.
After lying empty for 15 years the building is at last being torn down, and bizarrely, it turns out there are still cars in there. Eight cars no less, including the lovely Fiat Uno and Austin Maestro you can see in this image - captured by a Reddit user who works in a nearby building.
Rumours of ‘trapped’ cars in SkyPark had apparently been doing the rounds for years, with various theories as to why. Some suggested that owners had simply forgotten where they’d parked, while one urban legend claimed that the company just locked the facility up before the last few cars were removed.
Someone claiming to have worked for the company has what seems like a more realistic theory. “I used to work here when it first opened and they did buy so many bangers for testing it [the car park] before it opened,” he posted on Facebook, adding, “The reason it never worked was something to do with the bolts that they used causing the mechanism to move….Many a time we had to got inside and manually retrieve the cars using a joystick.”
Hermes Investment Management, the company redeveloping the site, is quoted by the BBC as saying: “The owners of the cars are unknown and they are now the property of the demolition company who will remove the cars once work begins on the levels on which they are located.”
So, if you want a dusty old Maestro that hasn’t budged in 15 years, you know who to call…
Via Reddit/BBC News
UPDATE: some of the cars spotted here have since been struck by fire. There were no casualties.
Growing up on a diet of World Rally Championship highlights and lengthy Gran Turismo 2 sessions, a life in cars was as good as inevitable for Matt.
Comments
a FIAT UNO! ahah my granpa had one
Hahaha! Dude my grandpa HAS one
A Fiat Uno and an Austin Maestro that have been parked for 15 years? How is there anything left of them?! xD
Well noone touched it…
Quality 👌👌😂
Gonna get that uno for building a sleeper
Simple, they werent in the rain for 15 years.
Too right, I am a local of the City and I have driven past that building so often and looked at it not realising there were two bad cars parked in there!
Craigslist be like ‘ran when parked’
those cars have been there since i was born and im an american who didn’t know this happened until now.
I bet if some one sold these cars they will be dirt cheap
Neither cars in the picture are great but i think along with whatever else is parked in there they should be saved instead of been inevitably destroyed by a bulldozer.
I hope they’ll save them too, but something tells me the demo company is just going to pluck the cars out with whatever excavator they have on them at the moment.
I got dibs on them all!!
When you find your car after 15 years
Funny thing is that scene takes place in an automated car park
Heard about the Ferrari Special Series? You guys at CT Car Throttle should make a post about that.
“is currently being demolishing”
I’ll have it. What a backstory!