Porsche Launches a New CarPlay App, This Time for Parking

Simply called Porsche Park, the new app was developed together with UbiPark and only offers support for iPhone and CarPlay. At this point, it’s exclusively available for parking locations in Melbourne, but Porsche says it plans to launch it across Australia in the second half of the year.

Porsche Park was designed from the very beginning to be as straightforward as possible.

So the first thing drivers need to do is to launch the app and search for a new parking place. To do this, they can either search by name or location, or if they’ve previously been to the same parking, to check out the favorite entries.

Once they select the parking place they want to use, the application starts offering navigation directions to reach it, pretty much just like the likes of Google Maps or Apple Maps.

Once the car approaches the car park entrance, the app automatically determines which entry lane to use, then using the phone’s Bluetooth system to connect to the boom gate and allow the driver to open it with a single tap on the PCM screen. No tickets or other papers are required for the whole thing.

After the car is parked, Porsche Park starts a timer to let the driver know exactly how long they’ve spent in the parking place and how much they have to pay in real time. When they’re ready to go, the driver can initiate the payment right from the phone or the head unit in the car using a pre-loaded credit card, with a transaction summary then display after exiting the car park.

Porsche says owners would also receive discounted parking rates at some partners, and non-barrier car parks around the Melbourne CBD are also being added.