Hat tip to Joe for sending this in, from treehugger.com:
At first glance it is a bit ostentatious, having your Maserati in your living room and a car elevator to get it there, but in some ways it makes sense. Underground parking is expensive to build and inefficient, with about 125 square feet of circulation and ramping for every 200 square feet of parking. With a car elevator there is no extra floor space at all, just the area of the elevator shaft and the extra wall enclosing it.
It’s nice, not having to carry your groceries from the car to the elevator to the apartment, even though the trunk of a Lamborghini doesn’t hold very much. It is also nice not having to interact with another human being in the lobby or the elevator, but to be able to live your life in an air conditioned cocoon , from home to garage to car to mall or office. In fact, for the $7.5 million that these apartments cost, you get all the benefits of a suburban home. Not only is there a car elevator, but there is a service elevator for the help so you never have to talk to anyone.
cars emit fumes, so they need to be airlockeed from the home, plus they are fire hazards, so, it’s a bad design.
Plus now it’s in conditioned space as opposed to unconditioned space.
Conditioned space costs $125/SF to build, unconditioned space costs $35,
plus unconditioned is cheap as dirt to operate, while conditioned space costs $15?SF to run.
This is ostentatious living.
My 1972 Pinto wagon would look great in there
Wow. And I thought they had these only in movies;
http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/tower-heist/trailers/guilty-27069659.html
( you have to sit through 15 sec commercial before the movie clip comes up)
How much does a parking space in New York, London or Singapore set you back? Maybe a carlift is actually a money saving feature?
You need a lower space that is street accessible for the elevator to go to. (Plus it likley is a hydralic elevator so by putting the elevator in you need 2x the square footage of the elevator car. It is not obvious how this saves any space, except that the car is now cooled or heated when you get in. I suspect it is more because the car in question is the pride and joy of someone.
But doesn’t HAVE to be in conditioned space. Could pull it into a ventilated space with a window between the parking space and living space. It’s totally cool, cept if the building is very tall and several floors share the same elevator, you’d have to sit there and wait in line for the elevator. Cuz one elevator holds lots of people, but probably only one car at a time.
In spite of some impracticalities, it’s pretty cool and I suppose a crappy car wouldn’t have the same effect
You wouldn’t want to back that pinto up inside the house. Hit the stone column and you could blow up the building.
An old Chevy truck would look good there.
Ya, as long as there’s rust showing.