Miami , florida : Park your car in the sky says Porsche’s drive-in condo tower
German luxury car group Porsche is working on a plan to put its brand on a new 57-storey-high, $560 million drive-in apartment tower at Sunny Isles Beach, Florida, which will allow residents to use car elevators that will whisk them straight from the road to their front door without getting out of their cars.
The drive-in condominium idea has come out of a collaboration between Germany-based Porsche Design Group and a local Florida developer, Gil Dezer, and the partnership believes the building will be the world’s apartment tower to whisk its residents, sitting in their cars, straight from the roadside to their front doors in a glass elevator with an oceanfront view.
“You don’t have to leave your car until you are in front of your apartment,” Jurgen Gessler, CEO of Porsche Design Group, told OPP this week.
The system has been designed so that the resident pulls over and switches off the car engine so that a robotic arm can scoop up the car and put it into the elevator. Once at the desired floor, between 45 and 90 seconds later, the same robotic arm will park the car, leaving the resident outside his or her front door.
“What this is really doing is taking two technologies that have existed for centuries and putting them together,” says Gil Dezer, president of Dezer Properties. “It’s taking the robotic arm and it’s putting it in an elevator.”
Planning approval has been given for the development, which will be called the Porsche Design Tower, and the cylindrical building will be erected on 2.2 acres of land at 18555 Collins Avenue. There will be 132 units on offer and the smaller units will be allocated two parking spaces and larger ones will have four, with 284 robotic parking spaces in total. There will be three elevators.
Residents will be able to see their cars from their living rooms. Units will range from 3,800 to 9,500 square feet and could cost up to $9 million.
Porsche is the latest luxury brand to put its name on a key landmark residential development. As OPP has previously reported, several schemes are already underway around the world branded with names like Bulgari, Versace and Aston Martin.
