This is absolutely genius. Do I think we'll see it in our lifetimes, probably not, but wow. We need more out of the box thinking like this.

I like this. It's a great feedback loop! Donald Shoup writes The High Cost Of Free Parking. An engineer reads it and begins thinking about how to solve the problem. Or, at least it appears to be a plausible way this idea may have come about.

This could do a lot to get rid of parking spaces...imagine the ability we'd have to make urban and suburban parking lots disappear. That's a whole lot of space saved...

Oops. I left my iPod in my car. Can you back up those last 7 so I can open the door?

Never going to happen. Pretty, but like so many cute MIT schemes, a pipe dream. I wish. And yes, the guy above makes a good point -- need to access the vehicle to get stuff.

This country will never see these schemes. Europe, maybe. Here people are too selfish and shortsighted. We'll sink into the ocean before we improve.

so...we have the iphone and the lincoln navigator. What is wrong with this picture? Face it folks, we are just sheep. Stubborn sheep. We don't want to go the that fresh green pasture next door, because we like stewing in our own crap.

This is a good idea, akin to the (more realistic, and already for sale) Tango electric car which seats two and is thin enough to park 90 degrees to the curb among parallel parking the way a motorcycle does.
However, these sort of solutions while way better than what we have today, are still only going to delay these sort of problems.
If we don't address population, eventually we'll need to rebuild all those parking lots to fit billions of half size cars, while freeways are clogged with 10 4ft lanes instead of 5 8ft ones.
We already have an even better solution: bicycles, trains, and only when necessary, buses. No parking issues, no traffic jams, no traffic fatalities, less stress.

CO2 is a hoax. there is no excess of CO2 and never will be. there is also no greenhouse effect from CO2.

apparently the majority of the environmental community believes this hoax. this hoax is only intended to enslave and kill people. so if people breathe out CO2 that must mean the world population should be reduced. i encourage anyone reading this to do a google search on this issue and examine the facts.

rather than focusing on CO2 (the replacement hoax for the now dead global warming hoax) the environmental community should be focusing on the problems caused by the massive air pollution coming from automobile exhaust and industrial pollution as well as the pollution of our water.

You are right mark.