Cars will soon tell you where free parking spaces are and let you pay using your dashboard

Parking bay payments will soon be connected to in-car infotainment systems which could revolutionise the way motorists park in private and council spaces. Peter O’Driscoll, CEO of leading parking firm RingGo says cars will soon be able to warn drivers which car parks have spaces free and then lead them safely into a space.

Drivers just need to operate the clutch, throttle and brake following signals and instructions from the vehicle.

However, these self-parking tools are still rare and often come as added extras with price tags sometimes more than £1,000.

Despite this, Mr O’Driscoll says a full autonomous parking system where cars can pay remotely may be operational within half a decade.

He added technology was already being rolled out across some car firms with more set to follow in the immediate future.

Many car park bays have already adopted cashless parking bays with a focus on smartphone apps.

However, GreenFlag warns not every driver is comfortable in using a mobile phone app while some drivers may not have access to one.

An investigation last year found three million drivers had been fined because they had no way to pay at car parks which had introduced cashless parking.

Peter O’Driscoll says interactive payments service penetrated around 45 percent of all parking receipts in the UK.

He says RingGo accounts for around a third of this as more drivers ditch pay and display machines for new technology.

Speaking exclusively to Express.co.uk, he said: “You have to look at phone parking as an evolution.

“When I started off the iPhone hadn’t been invented and you used to use key presses on your phone to pay for parking.

“It was quite a cumbersome registration process but once you were in it worked really well.

“Then along came smartphones and now we see that probably 75 percent goes through a smartphone app in the UK.”