Just before Christmas when parking slots were hard to find, the Mercedes-Benz Tweet Fleet with its Active Parking Assist tweeted empty parking spaces in downtown Stuttgart.

The cars automatically generated a tweet with GPS data out of every empty parking space they passed. Via Arduino the onboard electronics were connected to a GPS/GPRS-Shield. Tweets were generated with a PHP Relay which sent the GPS-Data. So people could find empty parking spaces on Twitter and be navigated there by a linked Google map.The press released this Christmas service the night before the promotion.

The press released this Christmas service the night before the promotion and within a day, Mercedes-Benz Tweet Fleet was ranked top 3 of the most discussed topics in the German-speaking social web.

Blogs, news-websites an magazines wrote about the idea and of course about the system itself.

Not only did this bring a benefit to people looking for empty parking spaces but it also brought the Active Parking Assist up for discussion and proved the innovation leadership of Mercedes-Benz.