Honda to Make Autonomous Cars with GM’s Cruise; Apple Vets Build New Lidar; Feds Can’t Stop California’s Net Neutrality Law;

Honda has committed to $2.75 billion in a deal with GM’s subsidiary Cruise to develop and produce a new kind of autonomous vehicle. Techcrunch.com reports that the vehicles are being designed from the ground up, but will be ‘space efficient’ and ‘multipurpose.’ GM, their Cruise subsidiary, and Honda said they expect to ‘explore global opportunities for commercial deployment of the Cruise network.’

A couple of refugees from Apple’s still secret Project Titan self driving car project started a company called Aeva, that hat developed a better lidar for self-driving vehicles. According to arstechinica.com, the new lidar can measure the velocity of objects in addition to their distance. Aeva’s version uses frequency modulated carrier wave lidar. If that makes your eyes cross, it basically means they send out a continuous laser beam with steadily changing frequency. The new lidar is nearly immune from interference, too. So far, no word on when they will market these to car makers or how much the cost will be.

The ink from Jerry Brown’s pen wasn’t even dry on California’s new net neutrality bill when the federal government sued to block it. The Department of Justice calls it a strong case, but theverge.com points out that most legal experts say the suit is on shaky legal ground. When the FCC ruled in favor of carriers last year, they included language that the Commission didn’t have authority to regulate the broadband ISPs. To put it succinctly, “An agency that has no power to regulate has no power to preempt the states, according to case law,” Stanford Law professor Barbara van Schewick said in a statement to The Verge.

“When the FCC repealed the 2015 Open Internet Order, it said it had no power to regulate broadband internet access providers,” van Schewick said. “That means the FCC cannot prevent the states from adopting net neutrality protections because the FCC’s repeal order removed its authority to adopt such protections.” So far, court decisions support California’s right to protect consumers rights.