Here is a picture of the kind of thing I’m talking about in case you have no idea. There’s a giant one across from my office that stacks them four cars high instead of three as in the picture. What are those things called?
Car-lifts or stackers.
I don’t know. I reeber reading a pretty innovative article on car parking in MAD magazine in the 1970s that included such a “futuristic” animal, though. A quick google search suggests “hydraulic car stacking system”.
“A problem waiting to happen”
All kidding aside, there’s a car-stacker lot near my office, and once in a while, one of the lifts misbehaves. Early on, a car got smooshed when the hydraulics bled off and the attendant forgot to set a safety latch. They’ve also had occasional troubles with the things not wanting to lift.
On a larger scale, there was a robotic parking lot in Hoboken a while ago that decided to hold all cars in it as hostages one day as the city failed to pay a software license fee or some such thing, and the mechanism went on strike until it got paid.
“New Fangled”? These kinds of things have been used in Japan for some time, now. I used to visit once a year (duration: a couple weeks) in the 90’s, and they seemed to be a cool space saving idea. Of course, they dont have as many HUGE cars as may be on the road here in SoCal…
Any Japan Dopers care to “weigh in”?
Indeed. The apartment complex my family lived in in the late 80s had a 2-level parking system. And many businesses in Japan have tower parking. That page says they’ve been making such systems since 1962.
I think they’ve been around in NYC for years as well. But I’ve only seen the one level of lift kind.
Does anyone else think skill at “Towers of Hanoi” may suddenly become marketable?
Patents on automated car storage structures date back at least to 1930. (USP 1782671)
An episode of ‘Thunderbirds’ circa 1966 (ish) had them 
How do those things work? How would you get the top car off if there are cars below it?
When I parked my car at one of those tower parking garages in Tokyo back in 1992, I asked the attendant if they’d ever had a problem with cars falling. “Just once, don’t remind me!” was his reply.
How do they work? (1) There’s a pit underneath it. The bottom car is lowered into the pit and the top car is lowered at the same time to street level. (2) Another method is a kind of slide in which the top car is projected out past the bottom car and then lowered to floor level. The first method I see mostly in outdoor lots here in South Korea. The second method in indoor parking garages.
The one by my office seems to work on the “How long will you be?” scheme.
If you’re going to be parked all day, you go up on the lift, so someone who’s only going to be a couple of hours can be parked underneath on the pavement. Like most high-density* attended lots, they’ve got your keys in case they need to juggle.
- By this, I mean the lots where they just cram in cars without any aisles, and they pray that the person that says they’ll not be back until 6:00 doesn’t come back early as their car is parked in the corner with 24 cars blocking them in.