About 60 local authorities in France have already installed a system that detects the presence of vehicles and alerts police if drivers exceed their allotted time.
The metres were devised by Technolia, an engineering company. In the future, they hope to use the technology to send a text message to the car's owner, warning them when their pre-paid parking time is running out.
"We are revolutionising parking with the individual monitoring of spaces," Claude Zandona, the company's managing director, told the Times.
The meters create magnetic fields that register the metal mass of vehicles and have a direct computer link to a police station, the paper said.
In the town of Issy-les-Moulineaux cars are allowed 20 minutes of free parking. But if they overstay, the smart meter sends a message to a police control room, which alerts officers through their mobile telephones 15 minutes later.
"That way police and wardens don't have to spend the day walking up and down the road," said Mr Zandona, who wants to bring the technology to Britain and a number of other countries.
"The police can go and sit in a café if they like and just pop out when they get a message to say a car is parked illegally. They have an 80 per cent chance of finding the car still there between 12 and 18 minutes after the limit, we have found. That's why we warn them after 15 minutes."
Mr Zandona wants to expand the system so motorists pay for parking with a personal identification number incorporated into their mobile telephones.
"The meter would then send a text message to warn you five minutes before your time was up. You could buy more time through your phone if you wanted.
"But if you didn't, you'd get another message to say you'd overstayed and been fined."
He said the fines could be sent directly to drivers' homes, reducing or even eliminating the need for wardens.
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