A resident pulls into the porte-cochere at Bentley Residences on Sunny Isles Beach. There is no valet reaching for keys, no ramp spiraling into a dim garage. Instead, sensors read a small RFID sticker on the windshield, a runway of guide lighting comes alive, and the car — driver still inside — is walked toward one of four glass-walled elevators. Thirty seconds later, it is on its way to a private garage sixty stories up. No button was pressed. No one got out.
The mechanism behind that scene, branded the Dezervator, is not a novelty prop bolted onto a luxury condo. It is a purpose-built piece of vertical transportation engineering, and understanding how it actually functions says more about how far building technology has matured than any marketing image of a car parked next to a living room window.
Not a Platform Lift — A Robotic Shuttle
The common assumption is that a "car elevator" is simply a freight elevator with a stronger floor. Reporting from Forbes, Dezeen and CNN describes something structurally different: a hydraulic system that grips the vehicle by its wheels and loads it onto a robotic shuttle, which then carries the car — and its driver, if the driver chooses to stay inside — through the building. The vehicle is never driven onto a moving elevator car in the traditional sense; it is captured, secured and transported as a unit.
At the destination floor, the same mechanism functions as a turntable, rotating the vehicle so it exits nose-first directly into its assigned garage bay, according to details reported by Carscoops and luxury industry outlet luxurylaunches. That detail matters: it removes the need for the driver to reverse or maneuver in a tight private garage, which is part of the engineering brief, not an afterthought.
The RFID Layer: Automation Without a Control Panel
The entry sequence is automated end to end. Each resident vehicle is issued an RFID tag; on approach, the building's system identifies the car, assigns it to an available Dezervator, and uses directional lighting to guide the driver into position, per reporting in Forbes and Carscoops. There is no touchscreen interaction, no separate app confirmation at the point of entry. The system is designed to remove decision points from the driver, which is also what makes it function reliably at scale across dozens of daily arrivals in a 61-story tower.
Second Generation, Not First Invention
What is easy to miss in coverage of Bentley Residences is that this is not a first-of-its-kind system built for the Bentley brand. It is the second generation of technology that has already been running in production since January 2017 at the Porsche Design Tower a few miles away in Sunny Isles Beach, originally engineered with Mid-American Elevator, according to UL Solutions and Porsche's own newsroom documentation. That system was rated for an 8,000-lb vehicle capacity and roughly 800 feet per minute of travel speed — specifications that circulated in trade coverage from Elevator World, an industry publication with no real estate stake in either project.
For Bentley Residences, developer Dezer Development partnered with Otis Elevator Company to engineer the next-generation version, confirmed in an official release distributed via MultifamilyBiz. In practical terms, the marque arrived nearly a decade after Miami had already proven the concept could operate day-to-day, not the other way around. Four Dezervators now serve the 749-foot tower, alongside private garages sized for three to four vehicles per residence and EV charging options, according to Forbes, Dezeen and Bentley's own media materials.
Why the Category Is Spreading, Not Shrinking
Axios has tracked what it describes as a genuine trend rather than an isolated gimmick: additional "car buildings," including Pagani Residences, are following the same model in Miami's luxury pipeline. That shift — from single showcase project to repeatable product category — is usually the signal that a piece of infrastructure has moved past proof-of-concept and into something a market is willing to underwrite repeatedly.
Construction on Bentley Residences passed its seventh floor in June 2026, with delivery projected for 2028. Inventory has moved from an original launch price near $4.2 million to current listings starting around $5.8 million, with a penthouse priced at $37.5 million, per New Atlas and market guides tracking the project. What began as an engineering question — how do you move a two-ton object vertically through a residential tower without a driver leaving the seat — has become a measurable line item in how these buildings are priced and absorbed.
Owners who already hold a unit at Bentley Residences and want a current, independent read on how that mechanism is factoring into resale value can reach out for a valuation grounded in what the market is actually doing, not in the renderings.
Fuentes
Prensa neutral: Forbes, CNN, Dezeen, Axios, New Atlas, Robb Report, Carscoops.
Oficial: Otis Elevator Company / Dezer Development joint release (distributed via MultifamilyBiz), Bentley Media official materials, Porsche Newsroom, UL Solutions.
Especializada/técnica: Elevator World (industry trade publication, independent of real estate marketing).