Car Stackers and Parking Lifts: Why Parking Belongs in the Design Phase

Parking is one of the last things designed into a commercial or mixed-use build, and one of the first things that turns into a problem. Councils want a certain number of bays. The site won’t give up another square metre. And somewhere between the two, a decision gets made that locks in the outcome long before anyone rings a supplier.

Here’s the pattern we see at Genesis Equipment: by the time someone calls us about a car stacker or a parking lift, the slab is poured and the ceiling height is fixed. Half the time our answer is that it won’t fit. That isn’t a product problem. It’s a timing problem, and it’s solved on the drawings.

What a car stacker actually does for a site

A car stacker, also called a parking lift or storage lift, raises one vehicle above another so a single parking footprint holds two cars. No columns, no mechanical carousel, no attendant. The vehicle drives onto a platform, the platform rises, and a second vehicle parks underneath.

For a development, that changes the arithmetic in three ways:

• Bay yield. Two vehicles in the floor area of one, without excavating further or extending the basement.
• Site viability. Tight infill sites that fail their parking requirement on floor area alone can meet it vertically.
• Cost per bay. Compared with the cost of another level of basement, going up inside the space you already have is a different order of spend.

The numbers that need to be in the drawings

These are the constraints that determine whether a stacker can be specified at all. They are not adjustable after construction. Figures below are for the Autostacker A6S platform lift as an indicative example – confirm the exact model against its own specifications, as width and clearance vary across the range.

• Overall height: approximately 2,311 mm. This is the driver of your ceiling height requirement, and the single most common reason a retrofit fails.
• Clearance beneath the raised platform: approximately 1,934 mm – this determines what can park underneath.
• Platform length: approximately 3,588 mm.
• Overall width: approximately 2,620 mm on the standard model, approximately 2,816 mm on the wide model.
• Lifting capacity: approximately 2,720 kg.
• Slab and services: the lift is surface-mounted with no pit, but the slab specification, drainage falls and power supply all need to be considered at design stage rather than discovered on site.

The short version: if the ceiling height, the slab and the power aren’t planned for the lift, the lift can’t go in. That decision is made months before anyone thinks to ask a parking supplier.

When to bring a supplier in

The most useful conversation happens while the drawings are still open – ideally at concept or schematic design, before basement levels and floor-to-floor heights are locked. At that point the options are still wide: how many stackers, where they sit, what they change about the parking count, whether the site’s constraints can be designed around rather than worked around later.

Once the concrete is down, the conversation is about what can be salvaged.

Genesis Equipment is a Gold Sponsor of Converge Expo 2027

This is exactly why we’ve come on board as a Gold Sponsor of Converge Expo 2027, held at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre on 15–16 September 2027.

Converge brings together Australia’s civil and commercial construction industry – engineers, designers, developers and project teams. It puts us in the room with the people making parking decisions at the stage where those decisions can still change the outcome.

“By the time someone rings us about a parking lift, the slab’s poured and the ceiling height is fixed,” says Steve Clifford, General Manager at Genesis Equipment. “Converge gets us in the room with the engineers and architects while the drawings are still open.”

You can read Converge Expo’s announcement of the partnership here.

Talk to us before the concrete goes down

Genesis Equipment is the exclusive Australian distributor for Autostacker parking lifts, and we ship, plan and install Australia-wide.

Browse the parking lift range, or look at the Autostacker A6S platform storage lift and the wider Autostacker A6W for the specifications in full.

If you’re designing parking into a commercial, residential or mixed-use build, get in touch early. We’d rather help you design it in than tell you it won’t fit.