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.