Flash: The Surprise Winner from CES 2026

Walk the floor at CES 2026 and you’d think you’d wandered into a robotics convention. Hyundai unveiled Atlas humanoid robots. Nvidia announced Alpamayo, an open-source AI platform for autonomous vehicles. Uber, Lucid, and Nuro revealed their joint robotaxi, ready for San Francisco streets this year.

The headlines wrote themselves: This is the year autonomy gets real.

But the real story was hiding in plain sight—not in what moves, but in where things stop.

The Autonomy Paradox

Hyundai demonstrated its IONIQ 5 Robotaxi navigating complex urban environments flawlessly. Level 4 autonomy. No driver needed.

And then it needed to park.

Hyundai brought a dedicated “Parking Robot” to CES—separate machinery to maneuver vehicles into tight spaces. Not because the autonomous vehicle couldn’t park itself. Because where it parks, and how parking is orchestrated across fleets, cities, and energy grids, is an entirely different problem.

Autonomous vehicles don’t eliminate parking. They concentrate it, complicate it, and raise the stakes.

Voice Changes Everything

The other quiet revolution: BMW became the first automaker to integrate Amazon’s Alexa+, the generative AI-powered voice assistant, into production vehicles. HERE Technologies and TomTom simultaneously integrated Alexa Custom Assistant into their mapping platforms—creating AI-powered navigation where drivers speak naturally to plan trips, add stops, and adjust routes.

No typing. No scrolling. Just conversation.

The in-vehicle experience is becoming the integration layer for services that anticipate what drivers need. Navigation, charging, parking—surfaced at the moment of decision, not handled after arrival.

Physical AI Beyond the Humanoid

“Physical AI” was the phrase on everyone’s lips—AI that perceives, decides, and acts in the real world. But the most compelling example wasn’t a walking robot.

Caterpillar delivered a keynote demonstrating intelligence embedded directly in a six-ton excavator, built on Nvidia’s Jetson Thor platform. CEO Joe Creed framed it plainly: Caterpillar “builds and powers the invisible layer of the world’s modern tech stack.”

That’s the insight. Physical AI isn’t limited to machines that walk or drive themselves. It’s intelligence at the edge—embedded at every point where real work happens. Jobsites. Factories. And the infrastructure that serves vehicles of every kind, whether robotaxi fleet or fifteen-year-old sedan.

Infrastructure as Operating System

LG Energy Solution won a CES award for Better.Re, a battery management system that learns from driving, charging, and parking habits. Autel unveiled its “Future City” model—AI-powered infrastructure where charging, energy management, and facility operations form a closed loop.

The pattern is clear: where a vehicle rests, and what happens while it rests, is now operational data. Parking isn’t downtime. It’s operating time—for charging, for maintenance, for V2G grid stabilization. The facility becomes a node in an intelligent network, not a building with spaces.

The operators who understand this won’t just manage assets. They’ll orchestrate systems.

The Open Platform Imperative

Everyone is looking at cars that don’t need drivers. An interesting alternative is watching where they need to go.

One thing is clear: closed systems can’t serve this future. When parking infrastructure operates on open, standards-based platforms, new players come to the table—CRE enterprises integrating parking into tenant experiences, cities connecting transit and mobility into unified corridors, EV and autonomous providers plugging into ecosystems instead of building around them.

Flash demonstrates this with numerous partners – combining navigation and parking into seamless experiences, unified in the vehicle. A destination is selected; the system surfaces parking alternatives. A few taps complete the transaction—before you leave, not after you arrive.

Expect more from Flash this year: partnership-driven architecture, deep integrations with navigation and OEM partners, and seamless AI-enabled experiences through smart recommendations and computer vision at the edge.

Image source: Hyundai Media Kit

About FLASH 

FLASH is a pioneering technology company bringing seamless parking and EV charging experiences to drivers through a first-of-its-kind digital ecosystem. Flash’s platform connects reservable parking and charging in the apps drivers use every day with garage, surface lot, event, and valet parking locations — connected and controlled via a cloud-based operating system with unrivaled intelligence. Customer-obsessed brands partner with Flash to deliver digital, easy-to-use, reliable, and increasingly frictionless experiences to drivers eager to pay for a solution that eliminates wasted time, excess emissions, and stress from driving. The solution has arrived. Visit www.flashparking.com to learn more.