Parkopedia Blog

Parkopedia had another fantastic year in 2019 with continued double digit growth across all of its core business KPIs. In the past 4 years alone, Parkopedia has more than quadrupled its revenue, number of employees and global data and transaction coverage.

There is currently a gap between parking operators (cities, universities, airports, private operators, etc) and auto manufacturers, in terms of understanding how current and future connected cars will interact with today’s parking infrastructure. While there are a number of factors that contribute to this chasm, one of the more important factors impacting the parking industry is the deployment timeline for in-vehicle connected services as they relate to parking.  

• Parkopedia and EasyPark to provide seamless on-demand in-car parking payments to Mercedes-Benz drivers;
• Service is now available in over 200 cities in Germany and is rolling-out across Europe;
• Drivers accessing EasyPark-enabled locations can pay for parking using the Mercedes-Benz in-car system and the Mercedes me© app.

Munich - 6 January 2020

• Für Mercedes-Benz-Fahrer: Einfache Zahlung fürs Parken direkt aus dem Auto
• Service in über 200 deutschen Städten verfügbar. Einführung in weiteren europäischen Städten geplant
• Fahrer können an EasyPark-fähigen Standorten mit dem Mercedes-Benz In-Car-System und der Mercedes.me-App bezahlen 

München, 06. Januar 2019 – Mit ihrer Kooperation ermöglichen Parkopedia und EasyPark, zwei der weltweit führenden Parkdienstleister, es Fahrern, ihre Parkgebühren automatisiert mit ihrem MercedesPay-Account zu bezahlen. Dieser neue „On-Demand“ Park-Service bietet Autofahrern eine einfache und bequeme Lösung zum Bezahlen ihrer Parkgebühren direkt aus dem Auto mittels des Single-Sign-On-Accounts beim Autohersteller.

Localisation is a central problem in robotics and it is very relevant to the AVP project that Parkopedia leads. A self-driving car looking for an empty parking slot must know where it is on a map. For a precise manoeuvre, such as parking, an equally precise map and localisation algorithm are required. 

Our Autonomous Valet Parking (AVP) team attended the Cenex-Connected Automated Mobility (Cenex-CAM) event on 4-5 September 2019, to demonstrate the progress of our 30-month Autonomous Valet Parking system project. 

It is predicted that Sweden will become the world’s first cashless society, and half of Swedish retailers are expected to stop accepting cash by 2025. UK Finance recently reported that almost seven out of ten people in the UK are using contactless payments, although debit cards remain the most frequent method of payment, making up 38% of all UK transactions in 2018. Almost half the world’s digital payments in 2017 were made in China, where consumers can pay for a wide variety of purchases through their smartphones using apps or QR codes.

When I started Parkopedia 12 years ago, I was driven by the need to alleviate the frustrations of drivers searching for parking. I knew nothing about the parking industry (apart from, perhaps, how to feed a parking meter), and it took Parkopedia a few years to build up the parking coverage to become interesting enough for an industry-focused product. Today, Parkopedia covers 70 million parking spaces across 89 countries globally and supplies parking services to over 20 of the world’s leading car brands, as well as mapping and navigation providers including Apple Maps, Garmin and TomTom.