Lyft & Magna team up to speed up self-driving vehicle development

Lyft, an on-demand transportation firm headquartered in the U.S., is forming an alliance with Magna International Inc., a Canada based automotive component supplier, to develop autonomous cars. Industry analysts believe that this strategic decision of Lyft is aimed toward building completely automatic mobility solutions for its customers.

For the record, Magna is investing nearly USD 200 million in Lyft for designing & developing proprietary self-driving car technologies.  Lyft CEO Logan Green has announced that Magna’s automotive engineering and R&D knowhow will help the firm build robust self-driving automotive systems. Reports claim that Lyft will design autonomous drive software, while Magna engineers are expected to handle the production & automobile integration of technology.

Both the firms are expected to carry out hardware & software development and safety testing. Lyft’s officials have further added that Lyft is going to design the autonomous drive software for the vehicle components of the third parties. Magna is projected to support Lyft by manufacturing a self-driving system and upfitting automobiles from various OEMs for operating on the Lyft network. Swamy Kotagiri, a chief technology officer for Magna International, has conveyed that this unique association is a blend of vast industry experience and a new mobility prototype for offering self-driving systems.

However, the recent decision of Lyft to align with Magna comes as a surprise for the autonomous car sector. Earlier in January this year, the ride-sharing firm carried out a test program in Las Vegas with self-driving BMW sedans by using self-driving technology of Aptiv, a UK based automotive parts tech firm.

Experts state that the partnership between Magna and Lyft will democratize the autonomous vehicle technology by helping automobiles to operate on Lyft’s ridesharing network without using its proprietary system. They are also of the opinion that Lyft is concentrating immensely on the future of the self-driving technology. The future apparently entails that ride services will be shared by the drivers, while the concept of private car ownership will be on the decline.