“You can even go shopping,” Mr. Milstein said, “bring things back to your car, lock them in the trunk and go on shopping.”

Image Pez dispensers inspired Keith Moskows garage design for a car-sharing service. Credit... Moscow Architects

For the developer, automated garages offer cost advantages in construction and operation. By omitting ramps and walkways, about twice as many cars can be tucked into the space. Labor and insurance costs are lower, and getting cars in and out is faster.

Michael Stolzer, dispatched from Stolzer Parkhaus in Germany to help set up the new garage, showed off the computerized control area and the storage floors. The cars on their pallets can be stacked more tightly than those in a traditional garage; clearance in the storage cubicles is only roof-high, not human-head high.

The design recalls the way bakeries stack goods on racks: car cakes on trays.

AutoMotion has built only one previous project in the United States, a 74-space automated garage at the Summit Grand Parc, a luxury residential building in Washington, not far from the White House. But the company has three more projects under way in the New York area, Mr. Milstein said.

Automated garages are much more common in Europe and Asia, said John Van Horn, editor and publisher of Parking Today, a magazine, Web site and blog based in Los Angeles. “There are thousands of them in Europe,” he said. “There is one on practically every corner in Japan. In the U.S., it has mostly been a matter of European technology licensed to people who don’t understand the parking industry.”

But the Baxter Street project is different, said Mr. Van Horn, who visited the site this month. “With the technology and the footprint there, it should be viable,” he said. There are economic incentives: a traditional garage on the site could have held only 24 cars, too few to be feasible. And, he noted, AutoMotion is affiliated with one of the building’s developers, the American Development Group.

An earlier and much publicized automated project in Hoboken helped to raise doubts about such operations. Opened in 2002, the Garden Street garage was designed by Robotic Parking Systems of Clearwater, Fla. In 2004, a Cadillac dropped several floors in the garage and a Jeep suffered a similar fate a year later. Jeff Faria, a spokesman for Robotic Parking, said the problems resulted from factors other than the garage’s equipment.