Hoboken's robotic parking garage drops unoccupied Cadillac six floors

What happened

Hoboken, New Jersey opened a fully automated municipal parking garage on Garden Street in 2002. The garage stores and retrieves cars by machine rather than having drivers park them. It holds 314 cars and was rented by the month.

According to Associated Press reporting from 2007, an unoccupied Cadillac DeVille was dropped six floors inside the garage in 2004. In 2005 a Jeep was dropped four stories. A later account in Government Technology magazine said two cars had been dropped and destroyed.

The Cadillac was unoccupied. The reports reviewed do not say whether anyone was in the Jeep and do not mention any injuries. They also do not give the exact dates of the drops, so this entry is dated to the year of the first.

The system involved

The garage was built around an automated storage and retrieval system supplied by Robotic Parking Systems Inc. of Clearwater, Florida. Software directs the machinery that moves cars within a structure about 100 feet by 100 feet.

The city owned the building, while the supplier provided the machinery and licensed the proprietary control software, an arrangement that later became the subject of a legal dispute.

Investigation and response

The vehicle drops were followed by further problems. In early 2006 a malfunction went unrepaired for 26 hours and trapped cars inside; the company’s chief operating officer said two redundant sensors had failed at the same time and a maintenance crew had not fixed them as promptly as company policy required. He acknowledged operational problems but said the garage had operated at 99.99 percent efficiency.

In the summer of 2006 the city tried to take control of the garage from Robotic Parking Systems. The resulting dispute over the control software shut the garage for about two weeks, stranding some cars, before the parties reached a settlement in court under which the city paid a monthly software license fee. City officials said they had been left dependent on the software’s owner, and the company said the city had overstated the garage’s problems.

What is not established

The exact dates and the technical causes of the 2004 and 2005 vehicle drops are not given in the sources reviewed. No public investigation report on the drops was located.