
A car elevator or vehicle elevator is an
elevator
An elevator or lift is a cable-assisted, hydraulic cylinder-assisted, or roller-track assisted machine that vertically transports people or freight between floors, levels, or decks of a building, vessel, or other structure. They ar ...
designed for the vertical transportation of vehicles.
Car elevators are used to vertically transport vehicles inside buildings. The objective of these lifts is to increase the number of vehicles that can be parked in
parking lots and
parking garage
A multistorey car park (British and Singapore English) or parking garage (American English), also called a multistory, parking building, parking structure, parkade (mainly Canadian), parking ramp, parking deck or indoor parking, is a build ...
s. Where real estate is costly, these
car parking systems can reduce overall costs by using less land to park the same number of cars.
Vehicle lifts, which lift a car at its center of gravity, are used in garages and repair shops and are designed to allow access to a car's
undercarriage for repair.
Examples
American politician and former presidential candidate
Mitt Romney
Willard Mitt Romney (born March 12, 1947) is an American politician, businessman, and lawyer serving as the junior United States senator from Utah since January 2019, succeeding Orrin Hatch. He served as the 70th governor of Massachusett ...
included a car elevator in his 2008 proposal for rebuilding his beach house in
La Jolla
La Jolla ( , ) is a hilly, seaside neighborhood within the city of San Diego, California, United States, occupying of curving coastline along the Pacific Ocean. The population reported in the 2010 census was 46,781.
La Jolla is surrounded on ...
,
San Diego
San Diego ( , ; ) is a city on the Pacific Ocean coast of Southern California located immediately adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a 2020 population of 1,386,932, it is the eighth most populous city in the United States ...
. The elevator is intended to transport cars between floors in a planned split-level, four-vehicle garage. Romney received final approval for the project in October 2013, after an appeal against San Diego's approval of the project was dismissed.
The
Porsche Design Tower, a high-rise residential building with 132 units in
Sunny Isles Beach, Florida
Sunny Isles Beach (SIB, officially the City of Sunny Isles Beach) is a city located on a barrier island in northeast Miami-Dade County, Florida, United States. The city is bounded by the Atlantic Ocean on the east and the Intracoastal Waterway on ...
, contains three car elevators. The elevators, named "Dezervators" after building developer
Gil Dezer, transport cars up to parking spaces directly connected to each apartment unit. The elevators are in circular glass structures and rotate to align with the correct car parking space, allowing residents to exit directly from their cars to their apartments. The building opened in 2017.
The Boring Company
The Boring Company (TBC) is an American infrastructure and tunnel construction services company founded by Elon Musk. Its ongoing and proposed projects are designed for intra-city ("loop") transit systems.
After six years TBC has completed on ...
, a company owned by entrepreneur
Elon Musk
Elon Reeve Musk ( ; born June 28, 1971) is a business magnate and investor. He is the founder, CEO and chief engineer of SpaceX; angel investor, CEO and product architect of Tesla, Inc.; owner and CEO of Twitter, Inc.; founder of The ...
, built a prototype car elevator in 2017. In 2018, the company received permission from the
Hawthorne, California
Hawthorne is a city in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, located in southwestern Los Angeles County, California. It is part of a seventeen-city region commonly called the South Bay. As of the 2020 US census, Hawthorne had a population of 88, ...
city council to construct a car elevator designed to connect an above-ground garage to the
Boring Test Tunnel
The Boring Test Tunnel is a tunnel in Hawthorne, California for testing hyperloop and loop-based transportation. It was completed by The Boring Company in late 2018. The single-bore tunnel was constructed during 2017 and 2018 using a diameter ...
, an underground test tunnel. The Boring Company intends to use the test tunnel and elevator for research and development of a proposed underground
Hyperloop
A hyperloop is a proposed high-speed transportion system for both public and goods transport. The idea was picked up by Elon Musk to describe a modern project based on the vactrain concept (first appearance in 1799). Hyperloop systems compr ...
system designed to solve traffic congestion in
Los Angeles
Los Angeles ( ; es, Los Ángeles, link=no , ), often referred to by its initials L.A., is the largest city in the state of California and the second most populous city in the United States after New York City, as well as one of the wor ...
.
See also
*
Automated parking system
An automated (car) parking system (APS) is a mechanical system designed to minimize the area and/or volume required for parking cars. Like a multi-story parking garage, an APS provides parking for cars on multiple levels stacked vertically to ma ...
*
Car parking system
*
Car ramp
References
External links
* {{Commons category-inline
Elevators
Automotive technologies