Hmm, I'd stand there and watch the thing park itself to make sure nothing went wrong, so I'm not sure it would save me much in terms of time and energy. Now, a car that washes itself would be a great time/energy saver.

agreed. i think this feature is a colossal waste of engineering time. bmw is using legions of scientists and engineers to implement a feature which saves people from their daily annoying 2 minutes. what for? they should have rather invested in motor efficiency, stop-and-go radar and other projects actually improving cost and safety on the street.

by the way, toyota is offering an autonomous parallel parking module for their prius. seems to work quite well, too.

Toyota already has the auto-parallel parker done:

http://www.engadget.com/2006/04/05/toyotas-self-parking-car-coming-soon-to-us/