African Turntables and Parking Solutions

African Turntables and Parking Solutions Reclaim space, improve safety, maximise ROI.

ATTPS provides custom turntables and automated parking systems that double or even quadruple capacity in the same footprint - helping Africa’s architects, developers, and planners design smarter.

01/09/2026

No ramps. No aisles. No driving down.

Think about the last time you parked underground. You drove down a long slope, round a corner, down another one, then along a wide lane looking for a space.

All of that slope and all of that lane had to be dug out, waterproofed, lit and ventilated. None of it holds a car. On a normal basement, a parking bay is about 12 m², but by the time you add the lane to reverse out of, the turning area and the ramp from the street, each space has cost you closer to 40 m². Two thirds of the hole in the ground is there so a car can reach a space.

And it gets worse the deeper you go, because every level needs its own ramp.

The WÖHR CombiParker 560 gets rid of all of it. Cars sit on platforms stacked in a grid below the entrance. The platforms slide sideways into an empty slot and lift or lower, the way a tile puzzle moves when one square is left free. You drive onto a platform at street level, park, and walk away. When you want the car, you tap a chip or use your phone, and the platform brings it back to the same doorway.

Nothing is ever driven between levels, so there is no ramp to build.

There is something else worth knowing. While your car is parked, nobody can get near it. It sits on its own platform behind a locked automatic door, and there is no lane for anyone to walk down.

On WÖHR's own comparison, the same cars fit into roughly 9 m² per space instead of 40. Around 75% less area, 45% less material and 42% less CO2 in construction.

It is not magic. It still needs a pit, automatic doors, drainage and a service contract. But you dig once, for the cars, and not for everything built to reach them.

WÖHR has been building these in Germany since 1959. ATTPS supplies and installs them across Cape Town, Johannesburg, Durban and Pretoria.

One doorway. Sixty four cars. No basement.Your stand is steep, your forty eight apartments need about seventy two bays, ...
18/08/2026

One doorway. Sixty four cars. No basement.

Your stand is steep, your forty eight apartments need about seventy two bays, and one basement level gives you twenty five. So the drawing says dig three. Ten metres into rock, then lighting, ventilation and fire escapes for the next sixty years, so somebody can walk down at eleven at night to fetch a car.

The WÖHR Parksafe 582 is a fully automatic parking system. The whole thing shows up on your ground floor as one doorway. Brushed steel, flush in the wall, wide enough for a car and for the doors to open.

You stop, switch off and get out. The doors close, the car settles onto a steel platform, a lift takes it down the shaft to the first free level, and a shuttle runs it sideways into place. Four cars to a level, two deep on either side, sixty four cars in a shaft twelve metres by seven and a half.

Nobody drives in there. Nobody walks in there. So nobody touches your car while it is parked, and nobody carries a sleeping child up three levels of a garage again. On the way out, a chip on your keyring brings it back to the doorway, turned to face the street.

Here is what it does to the site. Three basement levels take about seven thousand cubic metres out of the ground. The shaft takes about three thousand. Same building, same stand. You still get your seventy two bays, and the ground is still yours to use. A pool. A garden that is not the roof of a ramp. Two more units if the rights allow it.

None of it is fixed either. Underground as a shaft, above ground as a tower clad to match the building, or both. Two levels or seventeen. Eight cars or sixty six.

ATTPS supplies and installs WÖHR systems for developers and architects in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban, and hands over a working system.

Your bicycle tower can pay for itself.A Bikesafe tower solves the secure bicycle storage problem, and it opens a revenue...
11/08/2026

Your bicycle tower can pay for itself.

A Bikesafe tower solves the secure bicycle storage problem, and it opens a revenue line for the landowner at the same time.

Our previous post covers how the Bikesafe works. The revenue opportunity on the outside of it might be the bigger story.

Picture one at Stellenbosch University. The tower stands 11.8 metres high and 8.6 metres across, on a main pedestrian route through campus, with several thousand students passing it on foot and by bicycle every day. In outdoor media terms that is a strong site: high frequency, long dwell time, clean sight lines on the approach, and an audience that comes back twice a day, five days a week, for four years.

The structure can carry a full wrap or a single panel for advertisers, illuminated from the inside or not. The format follows the site and the client.

ATTPS can manage the advertising side for you. Some owners prefer to run it in-house, others hand it to a media owner on a revenue share. Whichever route you take, the money comes back to you, and it comes back every month for the life of the structure.

Your finance director will ask what it earns. That answer is what gets this project approved.

The same logic applies to a station forecourt in Cape Town, an office park in Sandton or a mixed-use precinct on the Durban beachfront. Anywhere the structure lands on a route people already walk.

Urban mobility, funded by the structure delivering it.

Reclaim Space, Recover Costs | Parking Solutions for South Africa | ATTPS

10/08/2026

Locked away. Out of sight. Back in 16 seconds.

Your campus already has students cycling in. What it does not have is somewhere those bicycles are genuinely safe.

Stellenbosch is the obvious example. The university runs bicycle sheds with student card access, the SRC has said openly there are not enough of them, and bicycles keep going missing anyway. Every stolen bicycle is one more student who drives in tomorrow.

The WÖHR Bikesafe is the finished version of that idea. Think of a safe with a German-engineered bike lift inside it.

A student rides in from home to one point on campus, steps up to a small booth, and rolls the bicycle onto two rails until the wheels stop. A door slides open and draws it through. One tap of a student card, and the machine lifts the bicycle to a shelf inside. Coming back, one tap brings it down, and the bicycle is back in an average of 16 seconds.

A R100 000 road bike sits behind locked doors where nobody can see it or reach it. Bags and baskets go in with the bicycle, so books are not carried from lecture to lecture. E-bikes charge while they are locked away. Everyday bicycles, road and racing bikes, mountain bikes and e-bikes all fit.

There are two versions, and Stellenbosch shows why both exist. The core campus between Andringa and Marais is heritage protected, so there we can go underground: eight levels of shaft excavated below ground, nothing above it but the entry booth, and nothing changed on the skyline. The eastern hostel precinct off Victoria and Merriman is newer ground, so there we can go up: a tower of 11.8 metres over eight levels, roughly four storeys, on a round base 8.6 metres across and wrapped all the way round. A tower where several thousand students walk past every day is a well-placed billboard, and the campus owns that space and earns the revenue generated.

128 bicycles in the shaft, 122 in the tower. 250 secure places, standing on about 100 square metres of ground. The same 250 students arriving by car would need around 7500 square metres of parking floor.

Campuses are the clearest case, but the same footprint works at a station forecourt in Cape Town, an office park in Sandton, or a residential estate on the KwaZulu-Natal north coast.

ATTPS supplies and installs across South Africa, and hands over a working system.

04/08/2026

At least 30% of inner-city traffic is drivers who have reached their destination and can’t find anywhere to park.

Anyone who drives into the Cape Town C*D on a weekday knows the feeling. You reach the building in twenty minutes, then spend another ten going around the block.

Traditional parking hasn’t changed in decades. A car needs 12.5 m² to stand still. Add the aisle it drives down and the ramp it drives in on, and a space in a conventional underground garage works out at roughly 35 m². Most of that area isn’t holding a car. It’s letting one move.

An automated system takes the driving out. No aisles, no ramps, no turning circles, because the driver never goes in. WÖHR’s own comparisons put the same parking space at 12 to 22 m², depending on the system. Roughly half the land, same number of cars.

Parking has always been the line item that eats the site. Let us engineer the parking and you choose the outcome. More cars in the same footprint, or the same number of cars and land back for the building. Fewer people circling the block, and a C*D built for urban living rather than car storage.

ATTPS is the exclusive Africa partner for WÖHR Autoparksysteme.



Source: ADAC, March 2022

Same slab. No excavation. Most of that driving lane becomes parking.Your basement holds 30 bays. Your development needs ...
03/08/2026

Same slab. No excavation. Most of that driving lane becomes parking.

Your basement holds 30 bays. Your development needs closer to 60. And there is no second level to dig under a building that is already standing.

Here is the part nobody points out. A driving lane is like a hotel corridor. With bays on both sides it works twice over. With a wall, a ramp or the site boundary opposite, it works once, and you paid for all of it either way. Architects do not choose that. Site shape forces it on them, and almost every basement has stretches of it.

On typical South African dimensions a bay is 2.5 m by 5 m and a lane about 6 m wide. Roughly a third of a well planned parking floor ends up lane rather than parking, and closer to half where the lane serves one side only. A single lane 6 m wide and 40 m long is 240 m² of concrete nobody can park on.

The WÖHR Parking Platform 601 turns most of that back into bays. WÖHR has been engineering parking systems in Germany since 1959.

Each car parks on a flat steel platform that rolls sideways on rails set into the floor. The platforms line up in rows, one behind the other, up to four deep. Every row keeps one empty gap, and that gap is what makes it work. A resident taps their electronic tag, the platforms in front slide sideways into the gap, a clear path opens, and they drive out. Nobody waits on a neighbour and nobody hands over keys, and the car stays at floor level throughout, never lifted and never trapped.

So one access route serves a whole group of rows instead of a lane in front of every second row. That 240 m² lane becomes a row of about 14 cars, and the cars are not squeezed to do it. The platform is 250 to 280 cm wide against a typical South African bay of 250 cm.

For the developer, the parking requirement is met without a second basement level, so the excavation, the concrete and the months never happen. Every apartment sells with its own allocated bay, reached across a flat floor with no ramp and no ledge. Charging points can be added later.

Two things to check early. The floor has to be exceptionally level, so an existing basement starts with a floor survey and usually a thin levelling screed. And the 601 is built around allocated bays for residents and staff, so a scheme keeps a small conventional visitor section, as most do anyway.

ATTPS supplies and installs WÖHR parking systems across South Africa, from Umhlanga and the KZN north coast to Cape Town's Atlantic Seaboard and Sandton. We look at your floor before anything else, and we hand over a working system.

Can a turntable be custom-built for a brand activation in South Africa?Yes. ATTPS recently engineered and installed a cu...
29/07/2026

Can a turntable be custom-built for a brand activation in South Africa?

Yes. ATTPS recently engineered and installed a custom rotating display unit in the arrivals halls at OR Tambo and Cape Town International: a large branded structure revolving continuously in a busy public terminal, with zero room for failure.

Why use a rotating display instead of static signage?
A motorised turntable draws the eye, holds attention longer, and keeps a product or brand visible from every angle. Set the rotation speed, add integrated lighting, and the revolving platform becomes the centre of the space.

What kind of turntable projects does ATTPS build?
Revolving platforms for events, activations, product launches and exhibitions. Rotating displays for car dealerships and showrooms. Custom driveway turntables for tight residential sites. Heavy-duty industrial and railway turntables. From a few hundred kilograms to multiple tonnes, we build to the load, the site and the run.

Planning an activation, exhibition or display that needs to rotate? Talk to ATTPS. We spec it, engineer it, and install it.

Custom turntable solutions in South Africa.

27/07/2026

One basement level. Two rows of cars. No second excavation.

Your site allows one basement level. Your parking requirement needs two levels' worth of bays. Digging a second basement is the expensive way to close that gap, and it is not the only way.

The WÖHR Combilift 542 is a sliding puzzle built downwards into the ground. While the car park is being built, a pit is excavated below the basement floor. Cars then sit on flat platforms, like shallow trays, at two levels: one row at entrance level where you drive in, and one row in the pit below it.

There is always one empty space at entrance level, and that space is what makes the puzzle work. When a resident calls their car, the system slides the entrance-level platforms sideways to open a gap above the right pit space, then lifts that car up to entrance level. The door opens and they drive out. Parking is the same in reverse.

Nobody drives underground. Everything a driver does happens at entrance level.

Every resident collects their own car at any hour with an RFID card. No valet, no attendant, nobody waiting on a neighbour. Cars in the pit sit fully enclosed behind automatic safety doors that only open when the right platform is at entrance level.

Here is the picture, as an illustration. A 60-unit development in Umhlanga has room for one basement level, and a conventional layout fits about 45 cars. The parking requirement is 90. The architect specifies Combilift 542 systems at design stage, pits are cast into the slab at each system position, and the same single basement carries all 90 bays. Residents leaving at 5am and coming home at midnight never wait for anybody.

The basement ceiling never has to be raised either, because the second row of cars goes below the floor rather than stacked above it. WÖHR's published comparison puts the cost per bay 23% below a conventional underground bay.

Electric car charging can easily be added to the platforms at a later stage, so the basement is ready for whatever residents drive next.

One thing to know early: the pit is civil engineering. The 542 is specified at design stage, before the quantity surveyor costs the project. It answers a parking shortfall today, in a building that must still work in twenty years.

ATTPS supplies and installs WÖHR parking systems across South Africa, from Umhlanga and the KZN north coast to Cape Town's Atlantic Seaboard and Sandton. We work alongside your architect and engineer from design stage, and we hand over a working system.

How do you fit all the parking a building needs on a site that has no room for it?It is the question that decides an apa...
21/07/2026

How do you fit all the parking a building needs on a site that has no room for it?

It is the question that decides an apartment project early, and the usual answers both cost land. A basement is the priciest part of the build. A ground-level parking field takes a slab of site you could have sold as homes.

Here is a third answer. The WÖHR Slimparker 557 holds all the parking the building needs, up to 23 cars, on a strip about three metres wide. And you can build it two ways.

Want it hidden? The Shaft sits underground beneath the single-lane driveway that loops around the block. All 23 cars rest out of sight below, and the surface stays a driveway, with just a discreet hatch at one end.

Want it seen? The Tower stands upright against the building, like a garage turned on its end, three metres wide, six levels high and four rows deep, up to 23 cars in all. Its exterior is yours to design, in fine cladding, timber, glass, or a living green wall of plants, so the parking becomes part of the architecture.

How does it work for residents? You pull onto the platform, step out, and swipe a card. The system lifts or swallows the car and brings it back on request, the furthest in about ninety seconds, so nobody walks down into a dark basement to find a bay. Every car is sealed away until a card calls it back.

Is it built to last? It is WÖHR engineering, built in Germany since 1959 and certified to European safety standards, made to run smoothly and quietly for decades.

And what does it free up? Because it parks 23 cars on the footprint of one, the land a basement or parking field would have swallowed stays yours to build on. On a prime plot in Newlands, Cape Town, that means more apartments to sell, or larger ones.

ATTPS supplies and installs the Slimparker 557 across South Africa, for residential developments in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban, and hands over a working system ready to use.

16/07/2026

Watch the ground open and a car vanish into it.

This is a double WÖHR Parklift 462, installed beneath a courtyard. Four cars are stored underground here, two on each of the two platforms, one above the other. We supply it as a single unit too, holding two cars, one above the other.

It works beautifully. Your cars rise out of the ground in about 20 seconds, and the roof of the lift is your courtyard floor itself. The top is finished in the same stone, paving, or grass as everything around it, so when it closes there is nothing to see.

The double unit takes about 29 square metres, every bit of it below the surface. You keep the courtyard.

Made for a home, a boutique hotel forecourt, or a collector who would rather not build a garage.

If you want more detail, our previous post on the Parklift 462 has the full story.

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