Have you seen the new robotic parking at Gatwick? It looks quite cool.
It works like this: you drive up into a garage bay, get out, scan a code, take your luggage and wander off to get on a bus to the terminal. Meanwhile, as you bump along the perimeter roads on your way to Pret a Manger and a surly greeting at security, your car is being lifted by a robot and shuffled into a parking space “fully autonomously” and presumably without the clattering of doors into each other or a young lad with a vape doing power slides in a field.
It reminded me of another experience in innovation I recently revisited: Pod Parking at Heathrow.
Ten years or so ago I tried it on a business trip to Scotland. A pre-dawn drop-off in a largely empty car park (back then it was still newish and posh enough to feel business-only), followed by the novelty of a solo ride in a pod to the terminal.
Returning this year with my son on a ski trip, it was slightly less fun.
A busy car park hunting for a space. A long walk with bags to the station. Then the ignominy of sharing a pod with other people similarly bedecked with ski equipment and making inane small talk before setting off on a circuitous, stop-start loop towards the airport.
Notwithstanding the fact that I’m now in my late 40s, travelling with rather more family paraphernalia and rather less wide-eyed consultant enthusiasm for clever infrastructure, the whole thing instead felt like a technically neat attempt to solve the wrong problem.
But before I explain why, let’s return to Gatwick’s robots.
Apparently they’re constrained a little. A fact mentioned almost in passing in the voiceover of what I assume was a press video: there are limits on vehicle weight, wheel size and wheelbase.
Plenty of people wouldn’t think twice about that. I did.
The service is marketed as a premium solution and has a five-day minimum stay. So it seems reasonable to assume a fair proportion of customers will arrive in large, expensive family cars.
Let’s say you own an i7, a Volvo EX90 or perhaps you’ve ordered the Range Rover EV. None of those can use it.
Already this premium, cutting-edge parking solution can’t accommodate a fairly representative selection of premium, cutting-edge family cars. Edge cases, perhaps, but also edge cases sitting at the leading edge of a market that is getting heavier, longer and increasingly fond of enormous wheels. The 21-inch wheel restriction feels particularly egregious.
Of course, the robots can presumably be enhanced. But significant capital has already been sunk into the system. Does the machinery now keep pace with the cars, or do customers eventually discover that their apparently ordinary SUV has fallen outside the parameters of the futuristic car park?
In any event, I started wondering whether robotic parking is actually solving a consumer problem. Or, more accurately, whether it is solving the right consumer problem.
From Gatwick’s point of view it may make perfect sense. Cars can be packed closer together because people don’t need to open the doors. You need less circulation space. There may be fewer staff movements. Less risk of somebody clipping a wing mirror or rearranging the side of a Cayenne against a concrete pillar. Potentially you get substantially more parking capacity out of an extremely valuable piece of land. Those benefits are undeniable.
But you’ll note they are largely benefits to the airport and parking operator. The customer has a rather different problem.
They want to arrive, find where they need to go without circling three times, get kids and bags out, leave the car somewhere they trust is secure, and ultimately reach departures with the minimum possible faff.
Preferably, too, without standing in a bus shelter in horizontal sleet debating whether the matrix display’s ‘6 mins’ has in fact changed at all in ten minutes.
Seen that way, the robot is doing something very impressive several stages after the customer has stopped caring. Once I’ve walked away from the car, I don’t really mind how it gets parked. A robot can carry it above its head while bleeping like a jolly droid. My attention has moved on to the next thing: where is the bus, how long will it take, will there be space for the bags, and how long do I need to stand next to the pseudo-Love Island contestant in coordinated loungewear before I’m actually inside the terminal?
Which brings me back to Heathrow’s pods. The engineering proposition is, or at least was, immediately seductive. Small autonomous vehicles, ostensibly on demand, with a dedicated congestion-free route to the terminal. The PowerPoint similarly likely wrote itself. Judged narrowly as a transit system, it’s evidently clever.
But the judgement should be from the passenger’s experience. Here the journey begins not when the pod moves but when you stop your car: park. Extract luggage. Work out the nearest station. Walk in the rain. Wait. Board. Travel. Sometimes stop — “We will resume your journey shortly”. Get out. Walk again with luggage. Find the terminal entrance.
That is the system and, when closely observed, some fairly boring alternatives instead appear surprisingly competitive.
Put more bus stops alongside parking rows. Increase their visibility and directional signage. Cover the walking routes (maybe even with solar panels). Tell people exactly when the next bus will arrive. Run enough buses that nobody really needs to think about the timetable at all.
And make the bus itself good. Warm in February, properly air-conditioned in August. Comfortable seats. Proper luggage racks designed around what people actually take to airports rather than a grudging shelf above the wheel arch. A driver who says hello, helps someone with a heavy case and knows where they’re going. Give the thing a bit of design attention.
None of that is technologically remarkable, but I suspect the combined effect on the journey could be disproportionately positive.
You’re unlikely to find an architectural visualisation of a man standing happily beneath a bus shelter on the homepage of Dezeen. Or a breathless article about wayfinding signage in Monocle.
But it may produce a better experience.
Perhaps, too, there is another behavioural wrinkle. Five minutes of waiting for something you cannot quite predict can feel substantially worse than eight minutes of movement towards your destination. Walking, as many have observed, gives you a sense of progress and control.
Although luggage complicates the calculation.
A 400-metre walk without luggage can feel like useful progress. The same 400 metres dragging two cases, a ski bag and a slightly recalcitrant child across coarse tarmac is not quite the same behavioural proposition. At some point movement ceases to feel like autonomy and simply becomes work.
Which is why shaving two minutes from the vehicle journey may be almost worthless if the passenger has had to drag their luggage an extra 400 metres to reach it. A beautifully optimised autonomous transit system can quite easily lose to a diesel bus simply because the diesel bus stops adjacent to your car.
So often, sophisticated experience design goes slightly wrong along such lines. Organisations naturally optimise the things they can see, measure and control. In this case: vehicles per hectare, average transfer time, labour requirement, throughput, number of drivers, perhaps even CO₂. All sensible metrics.
People, rather inconveniently, experience the gaps between them. They experience the anxiety of where to go. The extra walk nobody included in the journey-time calculation. The toddler who needs a wee. The suitcase with a wobbly wheel. The bus that pulls away just as you approach the stop. Such things are difficult to measure, don’t align neatly to one system or department and so disappear from optimisation models altogether.
So when we end up with technically excellent things that somehow feel worse, I wonder if there is also an element of theatre at play.
Airports have always been preternaturally good environments for conspicuous modernity. The driverless pods, biometric gates, robots and baggage systems, vast digital screens. They are signals, often at a national identity level, of investment, progress and future-facing willy-waving.
A covered walkway, even with solar panels, is not that. Neither is a bus stop being moved 80 metres. Yet either could improve more journeys, more often, for less money.
None of which is to denigrate the robots too much. They’re far from pointless and if Gatwick can materially increase parking capacity without tearing up more green fields, robotic parking may prove to be quite the investment. Judge it on density, operating cost, reliability and land use and the argument may be very strong. But then call it what it is: clever parking infrastructure.
The more useful question is simply whose problem we’re actually solving. Sometimes installing a fleet of robots that lets you cram more cars onto the same patch of land genuinely does improve the customer experience. Sometimes the customer would get rather more from a bus stop 80 metres nearer their car, an accurate countdown and a warm bus with somewhere sensible to put the cases. The difficult part of experience strategy is having the confidence to work out which before someone signs off on the robots.
AI: I used ChatGPT to tidy up some grammar and that, dear reader, is all.
John Gibbard 