The mystery of why eight cars were abandoned in a derelict car park for 15 years may have been solved.
The £5 million Autosafe SkyPark in central Edinburgh, which used robots to stack cars and was lauded as the “car park of the future”, went into receivership in 2003.
After lying empty for more than a decade, the building in Morrison Street is being demolished — revealing that eight cars were left behind when the doors were closed. Photographs of the abandoned vehicles have generated a number of theories about why they were never removed.
Now a former employee has said that they could have been bought by the car park’s operators to test out the robot equipment. He posted on Facebook: “I used to work here when it first opened and they did buy so many bangers for testing it before it opened. I know one car was a Maestro and they also had a Volvo.
“The reason it never worked was something to do with the bolts that they used causing the mechanism to move. Many a time we had to go inside and manually retrieve the cars using a joystick.”
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The car park opened in 2001. In theory drivers would pull into bays and robots would scan the cars to take them to the nearest space via turntables and lifts. The building had 600 spaces and was based on similar technology used in China, Japan and Australia.
It is believed that technical difficulties and the expense of maintaining the system forced the company into receivership. Urban legend suggests that the doors were simply closed one day, leaving several cars trapped inside.
The site is being turned into a 122,000 sq ft office development. Hermes, which is redeveloping the office site, said that the owners of the abandoned cars were unknown.