If Nissan has its way, you might not need to pay for a parking spot if your electric car has some range to spare. Autoblog notes that the automaker has opened an exhibition space in Yokohama, the Pavilion, that lets you pay for parking by sending electricity from the Leaf and other EVs into the building. You won’t have to worry about the cost of trip (beyond whatever it costs to recharge elsewhere, of course) if you’re determined to see the Ariya crossover or get a taste of Formula E racing.

It’s meant as a demonstration of Nissan’s Energy Share and electricity storage technologies, such as the use of Leaf cars to power homes and city infrastructure during disasters. The exhibition, which also highlights connected car and semi-autonomous driving tech, is open until October 23rd.

A software glitch is causing parking meters throughout New York City to reject credit and prepaid parking cards, The New York Times reports. The payment software was set to expire on January 1st, and the vendor reportedly failed to update the software before the new year. So, at the stroke of midnight Wednesday, the city rang in a bug reminiscent of those feared around Y2K, which predicted computer systems would crash.

It works like a kind of automated valet service. When Mercedes-Benz autonomous vehicles arrive at the garage, the driver will step out and direct the car to park itself via an app. Bosch sensors installed throughout the garage will give the vehicle the info it needs to navigate its surroundings. When the driver returns, the car will drive itself back to the drop-off location.

The system has been in development since 2015, and in the summer of 2017, the Mercedes-Benz Museum hosted a pilot of the program. Since 2018, visitors have been able to use this feature, but only with a safety driver riding along. Today, Daimler and Bosch announced they’ve received approval from the local authorities. The approval will allow the companies to fully launch the technology, and they hope it might inform testing and approval processes for future autonomous vehicle programs.

International support is coming, Musk added.

There are some caveats. Aside from the parking lot requirement (road rules would prevent this on public streets), you or your pin has to be within 150 feet of the car. This won’t help much if you and your car are at opposite ends of a sprawling shopping center. And of course, it’s only going to be as quick as the parking lot itself — you might as well march over if it’s particularly busy.

Nonetheless, it’s a big upgrade for Tesla users. Until now, Summon was only useful for inching into (or out of) a tight parking spot. Now, it’s viable for many of those shopping trips where your vehicle won’t be anywhere near the door.

Driving in an unfamiliar city can be stressful, and finding parking is even worse. Eventually, we’ll have autonomous vehicles to deal with that for us, but until then, companies are looking at ways to ease the strain. That’s why car rental brand Avis has partnered with mobility solutions company Arrive to add a space-finding feature to its app.

The Avis app already lets drivers rent a car on the go, and includes a bunch of other helpful features such as remote car locking — with Arrive integration customers in the US can now instantly find, book and pre-pay for parking. Arrive is already used in some 230 cities around Canada and the US, predominantly by third-party and business customers. Encouraging consumer use makes sense, especially as many city-dwellers don’t drive a car on a daily basis — knowing parking is already taken car of is just one less thing to worry about when you’re behind the wheel.

These self-driving, robo-valets look like large, rectangular boxes, about the width of a small SUV. They essentially act as a forklift, sliding metal arms underneath your car to lift it by the tires. Stanley Robotics told The Verge the system is much more efficient at parking than humans are — though that’s not exactly a high bar. The robot valets can fit 50 percent more cars in the same area, by parking them closer together and a few cars deep.

For now, Stanley Robotics will cover 500 parking spaces, but the company told The Verge it eventually wants to service 6,000 spots. There’s no word yet if the company will launch this at other airports, but it has held trial runs at Düsseldorf International Airport in Germany and Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris. Another test is planned for London’s Gatwick airport later this year.