Lyft, Magna team up on autonomous cars
Lyft is joining forces with Magna, the largest auto-supply maker in North America, to fund, develop and manufacture self-driving cars, the companies said Wednesday. Canada’s Magna will invest $200 million in the San Francisco ride-hailing company.
“This is setting us up to commercialize (self-driving cars) and roll out at scale,” Lyft CEO and co-founder Logan Green said in a press videoconference.
While Magna is not a household name, it’s a powerhouse that churns out almost every car part, from exteriors to electric drive trains. It also has a contract with some automakers, including Daimler, BMW and Jaguar, to handle the entire manufacturing process for some 200,000 vehicles a year.
“If you’ve sat in a car, you’ve used Magna’s products,” Green said. Parts suppliers, he added, “are the lifeblood of the auto industry.”
With 168,000 employees, Magna has 335 manufacturing plans worldwide and $38 billion in sales.
“Lyft brings ride-sharing leadership and the opportunity to promulgate self-driving systems to a broad network,” said Swamy Kotagiri, Magna’s chief technology officer.
The companies said Lyft will lead the codevelopment of autonomous prototypes at its engineering facility in Palo Alto, while Magna will lead manufacturing.
Once the technology is ready — no date was given, except “over the next few years” — Magna will deploy it industrywide, they said.
Lyft-Magna-developed robot cars will be available not just for Lyft rides, but also for other purposes.
Lyft is among dozens of companies racing to develop self-driving cars. In July it said it was creating a separate division in Palo Alto to focus on the project. That division now has 100 engineers, according to Luc Vincent, vice president of engineering.
The $2 trillion a year that Americans spend to own and operate cars “is more money than we spend putting food on the table,” Green said. “That is too much, and that is something we want to change.”
His goal: “Move the entire industry from one based around ownership to one based around subscription.” That transition happened with entertainment, he said, pointing to Netflix and Spotify as examples. For transportation, “it will have world-changing implications, building better cities and lives for all of us.”
Lyft has a raft of other robot-car partnerships. This week it said it will test self-driving cars at Concord’s GoMentum Station test facility. Other partners include NuTonomy in Boston, Jaguar Land Rover and Mountain View’s Drive.ai.
In May, Lyft and Waymo, the self-driving offshoot of Google parent Alphabet, said they would collaborate on self-driving technology without giving any specifics.
General Motors invested $500 million in Lyft two years ago, but the companies have been mum about collaboration. GM is focusing its robotcar efforts at its Cruise division in San Francisco.