Edinburgh's robot car park: Five years on from mystery cars being removed from a disused robotic car park in Edinburgh

It has been five years since a robot car park in Edinburgh was emptied in one of the most bizarre modern day mysteries in the last few years.

The building of an all purpose office block on Morrison Street led to an extraordinary discovery.

Eight cars, including an Austin Maestro and Fiat Uno models from the 1990s, were found trapped in a facility on the site.

SkyParks Edinburgh built the facility was branded the most ‘most technologically advanced car park in Britain’ when it opened in 2001, with the BBC reporting that robots would scan the cars left by the driver, and move them into a space using lifts and turntables.

Credit: David Hickey

The car park (surprisingly) quickly fell out of use, the company collapsed, and the building sat derelict for well over a decade before the new development work.

The paper was sent pictures of the cars being removed from the ‘robot car park’ via crane, and were flooded with theories of who these vintage, time capsule cars might possibly belong to.

Were they parked by people who then had a few drinks and left them there, only to return to find the doors forever closed?

Was it part of some criminal plot? Some government plot? Aliens?

A former worker of SkyParks allegedly said that the company had purchased some cars to test out the parking equipment, and these were probably them. More logical maybe, but not half as fun.

However they got there, the cars became the property of the developers, and have gone down in history in one of the weirder stories we’ve covered (and that really is saying something!).