Much has happened since the March 2018 announcement that Lyft and Magna announced their multi-year collaboration to jointly fund, develop, and manufacture self-driving systems. Lyft’s network combined with Magna’s automotive expertise has helped the team reach major milestones on an aggressive timeline, which ultimately helps bring the technology to market faster. At the 2019 NAIAS in Detroit, Magna gave a peek at the highlights. The partnership has allowed the team to attract and bring on board some of the best talent in software development, perception, localization, and planning. A team of nearly 400 employees is collocated in the new facility in Palo Alto called Level 5. In the first year of collaboration, the team achieved several critical milestones. Among them is completion of public road testing, including an autonomous ridesharing pilot with Level 5 vehicles for Lyft employees. The autonomous software stack and a hardware kit is designed to be highly scalable. In software, in addition to perception, localization, motion planning, and motion control, the team has created both highly efficient and scalable middleware architecture and an entire new toolchain—to accelerate the maturity of the stack. The same infrastructure is also used for distributed labeling and management of the AV data. For the hardware stack that consists of cameras, radars, LiDARs, IR, IMUs, high-performance compute, and customized power electronics, things like integration, packaging, and reliability are a high priority. Magna and Lyft jointly share IP created under the collaboration and use Lyft data to improve systems. 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 mobility ecosystem.

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