The melding of Silicon Valley and the traditional automotive industry continues. Ride-hailing service Lyft and Magna International, one of the largest automotive suppliers in the world, said they?re embarking on a long-term collaboration to build self-driving systems capable of operating without any input or oversight from human drivers.
Magna will invest $200 million in Lyft as part of the arrangement. Lyft?s engineers will lead the joint development of the system at the self-driving research-and-development center the company formed last summer in Palo Alto, California. Drawing on its six-decade history as a supplier, Magna will lead manufacturing efforts and potentially offer the automated technology to its customers around the globe. ?They can plug in our system into cars across the world,? Lyft co-founder Logan Green said Wednesday. ?They can deploy self-driving systems to all the OEMs they work with. From Lyft?s perspective, we don?t want just one or two companies to have access to self-driving technology. We want every single OEM to make self-driving vehicles, and for those vehicles to operate on the Lyft network.?
Despite much hype, ride-sharing networks like Lyft and Uber account for less than 1 percent of all vehicle miles traveled in the United States. But a proliferation of self-driving vehicles could accelerate Lyft?s vision of shifting the transportation landscape away from one based on personal ownership of cars and toward one that favors subscription servi...