The Proposed Porsche Design Tower. Image: Porsche Design
Condo living simply doesn’t work for the true gear head. First, you generally park your car in a garage filled with other occupants, most of whom don’t care about opening their doors at full velocity into the side of your car. They don’t notice door dings, so why should you? Worse, even gated, security-camera equipped garages are prime targets for smash and grab thieves, since they offer up the convenience of one-stop shopping.
If you like to turn wrenches on your own cars, you can forget about that, too. Most complexes forbid even the most basic of work, like changing your own oil. Even if it is allowed, do you really want to haul your tools up and down stairs, or in and out of the elevator, every time you get under the hood?
Porsche Design thinks it has the answer, and the company has sketched out a proposal for an oceanfront condo complex in Miami Beach. Rather than drive to your building and park in a garage, the proposed tower would allow you to ride a specially built elevator, in your car, up to your condo. You’d have the advantage of parking right outside your door, not in some dusty and insecure garage.
Motor Authority says the Porsche Design Tower will contain 132 housing units, with each resident getting a minimum of two parking spaces. Residents would drive into the building, swipe a card to call up the elevator and choose the appropriate floor, then wait patiently for a robotic arm to move your car onto the elevator platform. Get to your floor, and the robotic arm gently lifts your car off the platform.
As nice as it all sounds, we’re not drinking the Kool Aid just yet. We never had the patience to wait for an elevator when we lived in a condo or an apartment, so we seriously doubt we’d have the patience to wait for an elevator in our car, either. What happens if a lift fails? You can’t exactly take your car down the stairs, now can you?
We’re not the paranoid type, but the idea of having cars parked outside our door on the 22nd floor wouldn’t thrill us much. If something goes wrong and you have a car fire, your options for getting out of your condo are somewhat limited, even if you are relatively safe in your concrete abode.
The condos are expected to sell for up to $9 million, which puts them out of our league. Besides, we couldn’t deal with the traffic on Collins Ave. in Miami Beach, so that alone is reason to say, “pass.” We’d still love to see the system work, so shoot us a line if the Porsche Design Tower gets built and you buy a condo unit.
