Ride-hailing company Lyft is teaming up with Canadian auto parts supplier Magna to build and deploy self-driving cars. The companies announced the partnership Wednesday and also said that Magna would invest $200 million in Lyft.
“The auto industry has perfected all of these tools and all of those processes,” Lyft’s chief strategy officer Raj Kapoor told the Associated Press (AP). The company needs auto industry expertise to make autonomous vehicle components and ultimately build the vehicles, he said. The auto industry has perfected all of these tools and all of those processes,” Kapoor noted.
Lyft will lead the co-development of the self-driving system at its Palo Alto-based self-driving engineering center.
Lyft
This partnership is an industry-first and positions Magna and Lyft to enable the development and manufacturing of self-driving systems at scale, Magna said in a press release. In addition to self-driving vehicles that will be deployed on Lyft's own ridesharing network in the coming years, Magna has the ability to deploy the technologies across a wide range of use cases to benefit the entire global mobile ecosystem, the mobile technology company said.
Magna International Inc, having about 168,000 employees worldwide brings a lot to the table with Lyft in this partnership. Last year, the Ontario-based auto company earned $38 billion in revenue and has a market capitalization of $19 billion. The company builds cars under contract in Austria for Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Jaguar.
"There is a new mobility landscape emerging and partnerships like this put us at the forefront of this change," said Magna’s CTO Swamy Kotagiri. "Lyft's leadership in ridesharing and Magna's automotive expertise makes this strategic partnership ideal to effect a positive change as a new transportation ecosystem unfolds."
According to Magna, it will lead manufacturing and join Lyft's development team onsite. Lyft, on the other hand, will lead the co-development of the self-driving system at its Palo Alto-based self-driving engineering center. The company indicated that it would also be contributing their vehicle systems knowledge, safety and ADAS expertise, and manufacturing capabilities. Further, Lyft and Magna are expected to share jointly created IP and utilize Lyft data to improve systems.
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