Car Vending Machine: From Dealer Lots to ABB Robots

A car vending machine is a glass tower that stores cars on stacked bays and brings the one you bought, or the one you want to see, down to the ground floor in a minute or two. The idea builds on more than a century of automated parking. This post follows car buying from the first dealerships and the parking machines of the early 20th century to Volkswagen's Autostadt towers, Carvana's coin-operated machines and the 15-storey Autobahn Motors showroom in Singapore. It then looks at where ABB's mobile robots, food-service robots and chargers could fit around them.

A Carvana car vending machine on Texas Highway 121 in Frisco, in the Dallas area, 2019. Photo: Tony Webster / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Dealer lots, paternosters and the first car towers

The first car dealership opened in 1889, when Fred Koller started selling cars made in Cleveland, Ohio from Reading, Pennsylvania. In the United States, franchise laws in many states still require new cars to be sold through licensed, independently owned dealers. Automated parking grew out of two other needs: more parking spaces and scarce land. The earliest automated parking system appeared in Paris in 1905, at the Garage Rue de Ponthieu. In the 1920s the paternoster, a Ferris wheel for cars, became popular because it could park eight cars in the ground space normally used for two.

The Garage Ponthieu at 51 rue de Ponthieu in Paris, designed by Auguste Perret, photographed between 1905 and 1920. Photo: attributed to Charles Lansiaux / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Westinghouse created the paternoster system in 1923, and one was built on Chicago's Monroe Street in 1932. A year later the Nash Motor Company built the first glass-enclosed version for the Century of Progress Exhibition in Chicago, eighty years before Carvana's first vending machine. The first driverless parking garage opened in Washington, D.C. in 1951. Bowser, Pigeon Hole and Roto Park systems followed in the late 1940s and 1950s, and in 1957 alone 74 Bowser and Pigeon Hole systems were installed. In Japan, nearly 40,000 parking spaces a year were being built with paternoster systems in the early 1990s.

Cars parked on several levels inside the Garage Ponthieu in Paris, photographed between 1905 and 1920. Photo: attributed to Charles Lansiaux / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Volkswagen turned the tower into a way of handing over new cars. Its Autostadt in Wolfsburg, whose main pavilion opened in May 2000, stores new cars in two 60-metre glass silos linked to the factory by a 700-metre tunnel, and the cars ride up at 1.5 metres per second. A buyer who collects a car there watches on screen as the automatic lift picks it out of the silo. The car reaches its owner without having driven a single metre, so the odometer reads zero. Wolfsburg also has the world's fastest automated parking system, with a retrieval time of 1 minute and 44 seconds.

The two glass car towers at Volkswagen's Autostadt in Wolfsburg, 2015. Photo: Norbert Utz / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Carvana's glass towers and Singapore's supercar machine

Carvana, an online car retailer based in Tempe, Arizona, was founded in 2012 by Ernest Garcia III, Ryan Keeton and Ben Huston, and opened its first car vending machine a year later. In 2015 a fully automated, coin-operated version opened in Nashville, Tennessee, and the company now runs more than 30 vending machines in the US. The towers are still part of its marketing. On 22 September 2026 Carvana released a new spot in its "Shaqvana" campaign that puts Shaquille O'Neal to work inside one of the glass towers. Co-founder Ryan Keeton said Shaq was "setting up shop in one of our largest vending machines."

Carvana's car vending machine beside its office building in Tempe, Arizona, 2018. Photo: Elephanthunter / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Singapore has the supercar version. Autobahn Motors, a family-run dealership trading since 1989, built a 15-storey glass-fronted showroom that holds up to 60 cars. A customer picks a car on a touchscreen on the ground floor, and a lift system brings it down within one to two minutes. General manager Gary Hong got the idea from a display case of Matchbox cars at Toys 'R' Us, and told Reuters, "We needed to meet our requirement of storing a lot of cars." MotorBiscuit reported on 16 October 2026 that during the Singapore Grand Prix weekend Mercedes had its 2025 W16 Formula 1 show car, in 2026 colours, lifted onto the sixth floor.

The Autobahn Motors tower in Singapore at night, with cars lit up in their glass bays. Photo: Iorisrandombses5001 / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

ABB does not make car vending machines. Its Flexley Mover P604 mobile robot does a smaller version of the fetching job inside factories, lifting and moving loads without fixed tracks: it maps its surroundings with 3D Visual SLAM, positions itself to within 10 mm and shares its map with the rest of its fleet. In parking, ABB's role so far is electrical. At Olimpia Parking, which has room for up to 1,500 cars at Bucharest's Henri Coandă airport, ABB E-mobility installed 36 Terra AC chargers and a Terra 94 DC fast charger. A vending tower full of electric cars would need chargers too, and plugging them in with a robot arm is a possibility we looked at in our post on EV charging robots.

An ABB Flexley Mover P604, which maps its surroundings with 3D Visual SLAM. Photo: ABB

Where car vending machines could go next

For households, the appeal is the handover. A buyer who ordered online collects the car from a machine, and a visitor watches a supercar arrive in a minute or two. Robots already run a small version of that select and deliver routine with food. At BurgerBots in Los Gatos, California, ABB's IRB 360 FlexPicker adds toppings guided by a QR code on each burger's conveyor shuttle, and a YuMi cobot finishes the assembly. The whole process takes 27 seconds per burger, and ABB's controller tracks the stock of onions, tomatoes, lettuce and condiments as it goes, much as a car tower keeps track of which bay holds which car.

A YuMi cobot puts the finishing touches to a burger at BurgerBots in Los Gatos, California. Photo: ABB

For factories and dealers, the towers are inventory systems first. Hong says other developers have shown interest in using Autobahn Motors' Automotive Inventory Management System for parking services, and Volkswagen's silos connect straight to its factory. Car plants are changing too. ABB's flexible manufacturing concept for automotive plants replaces long rigid lines with scalable robot cells and AMR logistics, so a maker can start with a few cells and add more cells and AMRs as volumes grow. Feeding a delivery tower like Autostadt's from such a plant is a possibility, and RobotStudio, ABB's simulation software, is where cells like these are usually laid out first.

An ABB Flexley Mover P603 carrying stacked crates past machines in a factory. Photo: ABB

Regulators can stop a tower. In August 2021 North Carolina temporarily banned Carvana's Raleigh vending machine because the company had failed to properly carry out inspections and provide titles as state law requires, and the machine reopened in January 2022. Land is the reason the towers exist at all in places like Singapore, where EVO India says the format was meant to store more cars in a land-scarce city. Money decides the rest. On 19 October 2026, 24/7 Wall St. noted that Carvana's stock was down 31 percent this year. A tower is a fixed cost, so it only pays when enough cars move through it.

A stacked mechanical car park in Shenzhen, China. Photo: Popolon / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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