Saar: The Canadian phone maker is not dead after all.

British automotive company, Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), has reportedly joined forces with one of the most renowned phone makers of yesteryear, BlackBerry, to design and engineer its new generation of infotainment systems. As per the report, the Tata Motors-owned carmaker will adopt the Canadian company’s technology for all its latest models.

Surprised? Well, so were we, until we found that BlackBerry has been in the same business for quite a while now. In its recent past, the company has tied-up with tech giants like Qualcomm Inc, Baidu Inc and Aptiv Plc to license the technology for automotive use. With JLR, BlackBerry has agreed to license and make use of QNX software for cars and Certicom security technology.

The QNX technology is not new but has been evolving with time. It was the brainchild of a Canadian company – Quantum Software Systems – and it was in 1980 when it first surfaced. BlackBerry bought this technology in 2010 and has been tinkering with it ever since to ensure it keeps pace with times. In 2014, Ford announced that it was ditching the Microsoft OS (operating system) in favour of the QNX software from BlackBerry.

Infotainment technology in cars is evolving at a rapid rate. Features like connected and autonomous mobility are here to stay and will soon become standard features in our transportation setup. How far the British and the Canadians will go to inject the same set of features in JLR’s future models is something that the entire industry will look forward to. That said, Jaguar has been at the forefront of many projects which revolve around the concept of autonomous, all-electric and connected commutes. Recently, Google’s Waymo announced that it will be procuring up to 20,000 Jaguar I-Paces for its next phase of testing, which is due to begin later this year.