Rental car giant Enterprise Holdings will be the first organization to complete a pilot project in a new “smart parking” innovation lab opening next month in Detroit.
The Clayton-based company’s innovation initiative will take place inside the Detroit Smart Parking Lab (DSPL), housed within a Detroit parking garage and designed to test automated parking and electric vehicle charging technologies.
The DSPL is a collaboration involving the state of Michigan, Ford Motor Co., Detroit real estate firm Bedrock, and global technology and engineering heavyweight Bosch. The group said the lab’s development stems from a 2020 project that involved Ford using Bosch’s automated parking technology to park cars at a Bedrock parking garage. The soon-to-open lab will provide what its collaborators say is a space to test cutting-edge parking technology through “real-world scenarios.” The DSPL is located at a Bedrock parking garage in Detroit's Corktown neighborhood, which officials said is home to a mobility innovation district being built out by Ford.
Enterprise will use the DSPL to probe how it can use automated valet parking and electric vehicle charging technology for what it describes as its “quick turn around” process, which involves receiving returned vehicles and preparing them for the next customer. It is technology the rental car firm says holds promise for streamlining and speeding up its operations, particularly at its airport locations.
“To get this technology up and running in an airport would be absolutely critical. It would make everything more efficient. It could make our process that much easier overall where we could get that car pulled through the cleaning process and back in a customer’s hands a lot quicker than we do today,” said Chris Grayson, regional vice president with Enterprise Holdings in Detroit, told St. Louis Inno.
A Michigan-based nonprofit, the American Center for Mobility, will run the daily operations of the DSPL. As part of the new lab, the state of Michigan has launched the Mobility Funding Program to back innovation projects taking place at the facility, with Enterprise snagging an undisclosed grant award for its initiative, according to officials.
Enterprise Assistant Vice President of Innovation Chris Haffenreffer said the Clayton-based company was drawn to the DSPL because the project hits on three strategic innovation priorities for the $22.5 billion rental car company: connected cars, autonomous driving and electric vehicles.
“We don’t want to be out there innovating just for the sake of innovating. We want to make sure we understand exactly what we want to achieve when we’re engaging in innovation projects. This was really unique in that it checked many different boxes. We’ve got the connected car angle, we’ve got the autonomous angle and the electric vehicle angle,” Haffenreffer said.
Enterprise Holdings operates the Enterprise Rent-A-Car, National Car Rental and Alamo Rent A Car brands, and Enterprise Fleet Management. The St. Louis-region's largest privately held company, it is owned by the Taylor family.
Enterprise expects its DSPL project to last several months, with the first insights from the project likely this fall. Haffenreffer said the structure of the new innovation lab, with its several collaborators, is critical to driving innovation within the automotive and technology space.
“As we look at technology that’s going to be incorporated into our business in the coming years, partnerships are going to be paramount for us. You see that in the industry already, in terms of a lot of the autonomous partnerships and technology development that’s happening,” he said. “We can’t do this alone. The partnerships in terms of new technology development are going to be really important."
