In the future we may well drop our car off at the entrance to the shopping mall car park, and leave it to drive itself to a refueling point and then automatically park up to wait for our return. Sounds incredible? Not if German motor group VW has its way. But you will need an electric vehicle to take advantage of this kind of ‘shop & charge’ valet service.

The company demonstrated their ultra high tech valet vision in Amsterdam recently, using a bunch of sci-fi technology, like wireless induction charging, an autonomous self-driving electric Golf and a fancy robot station. The first part, V-Charge, uses a wireless charging plate on the floor of the car park to charge up the vehicle automatically as it sits in a parking slot.

The car automatically drives into the parking slot and stops over the top of the charging plate, at which point charging starts going. It that’s too slow for you, then you can use a faster charge method with the robot doing all the hard work, while you go grab a cafe latte or whatever. The video below gives a demo of all the valet charge parking tech.

It’s all a bit too close to weird future robot-land for our liking.