Belt up and enjoy this 365-day ride as you cruise past the most momentous motoring events in history. Packed with fascinating facts about races, motorists and the history of the mighty engine, this is a must-visit web site for any car enthusiast.

On This Day

Wednesday 5th December 1951

68 years ago

The first push button-controlled Park-O-Mat garage opened in Washington, DC by Parking Services Inc. It had no ramps, no aisles and no lanes. Instead a single attendant, without entering a car, could automatically park or return a car in less than a minute. It used a "vehicle parking apparatus" (patented 14 Oct 1947, No. 2,428,856). Two elevators parked 72 cars on a site just of 25 by 40 feet. The garage was an open building with 16 floors and 2 basement levels.The attendant, who retrieved the car by operating the elevator from ground level, never steps inside the vehicle.The Park-O-Mat bespeaks an era, the postwar boom years in America when automation was the rage. Automats, or automated cafeterias, were popular, and it was also the time when laundromats, still a fixture in the urban landscape, appeared on the scene.While the original Park-O-Mat was a fairly short-lived phenomenon, the more sophisticated automated parking garage is enjoying something of a renaissance in U.S. cities where parking is tight (i.e., practically all of them).