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Updated 01/11/2013 11:16 AM

CES 2013: Audi concept car parks itself

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Watching a car park is nothing special…until you realize it's the car that's actually doing the parking, not a person behind the wheel. What's equally amazing about this Audi concept car - hit a button on a smartphone and it'll come pick you up.

Annie Lien of Audi said, "It's your own personal valet parker so you can press a button on a smartphone and it can drive up to your front door or let's say you came to a hotel or coming to a shopping center you can press a button on your smartphone and it'll go through a parking structure and actually find its own parking space and park itself."

Audi says its also testing this concept on the streets of Nevada as we speak...a car that can take over for you when you hit stop and go traffic. It'll keep up with the flow of the traffic while you're behind the wheel freeing you to check emails, watch a movie.

Bjorn Giesler of Audi said, "We're concentrating on traffic jams on freeways right now so that would be a stop and go range from zero to 40 mph."

Lexus also showed off an autonomous concept car at CES, which it says can drive itself, though developers prefer to think of all the technologies inside acting more like a co-pilot to make you, the human driver, a better driver.

Mark Templin of Lexus said, "Our goal is a system that constantly perceives, processes, and responds to its surroundings. That scans the movement of objects around it, identifies a green light from a red light, and measures the trajectory, roll, pitch, and yaw of a vehicle as it steers, accelerates and brakes along the most efficient route to its destination."

So when will have a self driving car? Who knows. The bigger take away here is probably that as manufacturers continue to develop these vehicles some of these technologies will start to trickle down into cars you will be able to buy in just the next few years.

James Meigs of Popular Mechanics Magazine said, "We're seeing these filter into high end cars already collision warnings, lane departure warnings that kind of thing it basically makes cars safer."

Developers predict many of these features could easily hit production models within just the next ten years.