Parking in Japan...Good and Bad

While I have the luxury of a two car garage, whenever I take the IS F out for a drive, I always try to find a safe location to park it.

You might think that, because Japan is such a crowded country that parking would be a premium, and that most spaces would be as tightly packed as possible. And sometimes cars barely fit into their spaces. And this is true.

From, http://girigiriparking.blog34.fc2.com/blog-entry-41.html

However, Japan is also home to probably the most number of mechanical parking garages. This usually involves a pallet onto which you drive your car, and then that pallet moves about in a certain geometric manner to maximize use of space.  These garages can be simple - a pallet that just goes up to fit 2 cars in the space of one, or can be mechanized to move horizontally as well as vertically,  for example 3 cars wide but 5 cars tall, sort of like a Tetris game, with one unused space like those puzzles.

With my GT-R, when I lived in Tokyo, I absolutely hated the parking structure.  This was because not only did it take forever for my car to appear, but also because humans were able to walk into the structure (on the ground level), and as the cars where tightly packed together, someone's bag or zipper would cause scratching. That, and as my car is lowered sometimes I'm not able to use the pallets!

Check out this old link on my GT-R Blog for photos.

Anyway, the other day I had to go to Chinatown in Yokohama for dinner. And was pleasantly surprised that 1) my IS F did not scrape the pallet, but 2) the car has a surprisingly wide tread, I only had a couple of centimeters on each side of the wheels as they fit into the pallet's track.

When we parked, the car simply vanished up, as if being vacuumed. But on the way down, there was more of a performance.

Enjoy the video: