AURORA, ON—Magna International Inc., a leading Tier One supplier, will develop and manufacture self-driving cars for Lyft, a leading ride-hailing company. The strategic partnership, an industry first, will enable Magna to mass-produce autonomous vehicles.

Magna already is a leading contract manufacturer, producing vehicles for customers such as BMW, Daimler and Jaguar Land Rover at its state-of-the-art assembly plant in Graz, Austria.

“There is a new mobility landscape emerging and partnerships like this put us at the forefront of this change,” claims Swamy Kotagiri, chief technology officer at Magna. “Lyft’s leadership in [ride-hailing] and Magna’s automotive expertise makes this strategic partnership ideal to effect a positive change as a new transportation ecosystem unfolds.

“In addition to self-driving vehicles that will be deployed on Lyft’s own [ride-hailing] 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 mobility ecosystem,” says Kotagiri.

“Together with Magna, we will accelerate the introduction of self-driving vehicles by sharing our technology with automotive OEMs worldwide,” adds Logan Green, CEO of Lyft. “This is an entirely new approach that will democratize access to this transformative technology.”

Lyft will lead co-development of the new vehicles at its self-driving engineering center in Palo Alto, CA. Magna will lead manufacturing and join Lyft’s development team onsite, contributing its vehicle systems knowledge, manufacturing capabilities and assembly expertise.