View into a vertical parking tower where a car is parked.

Safe and efficient: in VePa’s parking and charging tower, electric vehicles are supplied with electricity in the parking boxes thanks to patented rails.

| VePa Vertical Parking

2025-10-01 VDE dialog

Vertical parking: Freeing up urban space

Parking spaces are indispensable in cities, but they eat up precious land. The Munich-based company VePa has set itself the task of changing this using vertical space.

By Michael Neißendorfer

“This is where the magic happens,” says David Schön from VePa (which stands for “Vertical Parking”) as he unlocks the door to the twelve-meter-high parking tower his company built in Munich’s Werksviertel district. “This bright red motor here at the top is the heart of the system. Up to twelve cars ride the tower like a giant paternoster, moving in a continuous loop,” says the company’s co-founder and CEO.

Just a few weeks earlier, VePa’s opened its first public parking tower – based on a prototype on a company site in Freising – in an official ceremony attended by more than 200 guests. The main aim, says Schön, is to show that the concept works and to gather feedback from users. The site itself isn’t ideal: “There are two underground car parks right nearby and you can park for free on the roadside. Even so, we have an occupancy rate of around 25 percent, including a lot of electric car drivers.” They obviously appreciate the fact that they can conveniently charge their vehicle here.

Schön describes the power supply as the company’s real innovation, consisting of a circulating conductor rail that supplies the six wallboxes with energy. Thanks to a charging capacity of up to 11 kW, most batteries fill up in just a few hours. VePa intends to enable faster charging at up to 22 kW in new towers, with plans for charging at up to 50 kW in the future.

“The tower is full of light barriers and sensors that detect, for example, the size of the vehicle and whether there are still people or animals in the car or in the interior,” says the founder, explaining the safety concept. “If there is an error message here, the elevator simply won’t move.” Fire protection is also automated, with each gondola having its own extinguishing system.

In this Munich parking tower with integrated charging structure, up to 12 cars can be parked on a floor space of 49 square meters.

| VePa Vertical Parking

At around 750,000 euros, a parking tower isn’t cheap. But such an investment pays for itself “relatively quickly”, says Schön, especially when compared to the cost of an underground parking garage. There are also other levers that improve profitability in addition to the income from parking fees: “Charging current and advertising on the façade, for example. And we can think of many more ideas.” Depending on the location, the return on investment currently comes within three to five years. In addition to the cost, the carbon footprint of a parking tower is also better than a concrete underground car park, explains Schön: “Our construction produces around 95 percent less CO2. For a tower, we only need 49 square meters at ground level, the building permit for the area and a power connection,” which also shortens the construction time enormously. A PV system on the roof also contributes to sustainability.

VePa can build even higher parking towers to fit up to 20 cars – on an area equivalent to four parking spaces. Schön often hears the objection that having even more parking spaces is difficult to reconcile with the idea of a transport transition with fewer cars in cities – and he makes it clear: “Our goal is not to create more parking spots. We want to give cities back open space. We want to make land use fairer.” Ideally, a tower should replace parking spaces “which can then be unsealed and used for other purposes, such as for trees, for playgrounds and for places where people actually want to spend time.” The towers themselves can also be covered in vertical greenery. “And while cities push forward with the mobility transition, we are creating urgently needed charging options for electric vehicles without having to equip entire streets with charging points at great expense.”

So far, the idea is catching on. Project developers, construction companies and local authorities are all showing an interest in parking towers. In Hamburg, the Greens and CDU have just submitted a joint proposal to address the parking shortage in Eimsbüttel with vertical parking systems. “We are currently looking for suitable sites and have around 25 on our shortlist.” VePa’s CEO promises that the towers will be free of charge for the city: “We will cover the investment and refinance the costs through the income from parking and charging fees, which will be based on local conditions.”