Day: January 2, 2020

Auto-parts maker Bosch is getting into the lidar business, the company said in a Thursday announcement. That’s significant because Bosch is a “tier 1” supplier—one of the few companies with the scale and infrastructure to supply parts directly to global car makers.

Little is known about Bosch’s lidar. Bosch says the technology has been developed in-house and boasts a long range and a wide field of view. But the company declined to provide Ars Technica with hard numbers on range, field of view, cost, or other characteristics. That makes comparing Bosch’s lidar to the competition a challenge.

But what Bosch’s announcement does make clear is that lidar is about to shift from an experimental technology to an increasingly common feature on new cars. The fact that companies like Bosch are selling lidar means it will be feasible for major automakers to start offering lidar as an option.

At least one carmaker—Audi—has already started shipping some cars with lidar. Audi’s lidar is made by Bosch rival Valeo. As lidar technology becomes more mature and affordable, we can expect other carmakers to follow Audi’s lead—much as radar became increasingly common in cars in the late 1990s and 2000s.

Right now, the most powerful—and expensive—lidar is used for prototypes of fully self-driving cars. These lidars tout ranges over 200 meters and can cost tens of thousands of dollars. The lidar Valeo sold to Audi isn’t in this class. Exact pricing isn’t publicly available, but rumors suggest that Valeo’s lidar costs hundreds of dollars in volume. These less expensive lidars tend to have lower range and resolution.

Still, they can add a lot of value.

Right now, most advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) rely on radar as the primary way to track nearby objects. But radar sensors have severe limitations. They have low horizontal and vertical resolution, making them incapable of distinguishing a car directly ahead from a metal sign overhead or a concrete lane divider next to the road.

Many of today’s ADAS systems cope with this by ignoring objects that are not moving relative to the road. That works most of the time on freeways, since other cars are usually moving and large stationary objects are usually not in a travel lane. But it means that ADAS systems occasionally make mistakes like steering right into a parked fire truck.

Hence, lidar has the potential to substantially improve the performance of today’s ADAS systems. Radar may not be able to distinguish a fire truck parked next to the travel lane from one parked in the travel lane. But a lidar sensor can. With help from lidar, the next generation of ADAS systems will better understand its environment and be able to avoid more crashes.

The past few days have been filled with drama for one of the auto industry’s most well-known executives. Carlos Ghosn used to run the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance, a complicated partnership-not-a-merger between the three car makers that sells more metal than everyone other than Toyota and Volkswagen Group. But in November 2018, he was arrested by Japanese police on charges of financial misconduct and was replaced as the head of both Nissan and Mitsubishi.

However, Ghosn claimed that he was being set up by rivals at Nissan, who he said were behind claims that he pocketed payments to Middle Eastern car dealerships and hid income beyond his multimillion dollar annual salary. After spending more than three months in jail, Ghosn was released on bail—a hefty $9 million (1 billion yen)—but was kept under house arrest.

Rather than continuing to submit to the Japanese criminal justice system—which has a near-perfect conviction rate, sharing few of the same protections for suspects that exist in the US or Europe—Ghosn apparently decided a change of scenery was in order. Which is where it all gets a bit weird. Late on the night of December 29, he managed to flee the country for Lebanon; he holds Lebanese (as well as French and Brazilian) citizenship and is close with the Lebanese government, which does not have an extradition treaty with Japan.

On New Year’s Eve, Ghosn issued a statement from Lebanon saying that he would “no longer be held hostage by a rigged Japanese justice system where guilt is presumed, discrimination is rampant, and basic human rights are denied, in flagrant disregard of Japan’s legal obligations under international law and treaties it is bound to uphold.”

The Japanese authorities are still trying to determine just how Ghosn managed to evade their surveillance. Japanese broadcaster NHK reported that Ghosn had two French passports, and the courts allowed him to keep one of them in a locked case rather than having it held by his lawyers (along with the Lebanese, Brazilian, and that other French passport). For their part, Lebanese authorities say he entered the country legally under a French passport.

Initial reports that he had been hiding in a box meant to contain musical instruments for a band that played at his house are apparently wide of the mark. Instead, it’s more likely that he was smuggled onto a private cargo jet in Osaka, bound for Istanbul, Turkey. The Turks aren’t particularly happy about being involved and have arrested four pilots, two ground handlers, and the operations manager of the cargo company for their involvement in the escape.

Now, Interpol has issued an arrest warrant for Ghosn, who released a second statement on Thursday stating that his escape was all his doing and that neither his wife nor other family members were involved.

Leading drug makers rang in the new year by once again raising list prices of their drugs—this time on more than 250 of them, according to an analysis reported by Reuters.

Data examined by healthcare research firm 3 Axis Advisors found that major drug makers including Pfizer Inc, GlaxoSmithKline PLC, and Sanofi SA, Bristol-Myers Squibb Co, Gilead Sciences Inc, and Biogen Inc hiked prices this week.

The larger price tags applied to a range of medications, from blood thinners to cancer therapies and treatments for respiratory conditions, HIV, arthritis, and multiple sclerosis.

Nearly all of the increases were below 10 percent, according to the 3 Axis analysis. So far, the median price increase is around 5 percent, though additional price increases could still be announced.

Pricing hikes of less than 10 percent are relatively low; drug makers have made headlines in recent years for with abrupt, eye-popping increases, such as 879 percent and an infamous hike of more than 5,000 percent. Amid backlash for the hikes—and the country’s exorbitant drug pricing overall—many pharmaceutical companies have pledged to keep their annual price increases to 10 percent or lower.

Still, that lower rate greatly exceeds that of inflation. As of November, the 2019 inflation rate was 2.1 percent.

In

a statement to Reuters

, Sanofi noted that its increases were in line with the company’s commitment to keep the rate of increases below “medical inflation.”

Though consumers rarely pay list prices for drugs, the increases can add to overall healthcare costs that can in turn raise insurance premiums.

Drug makers typically increase the list prices of drugs twice a year and have continued to do so amid intense public scrutiny. Last year, drug makers went ahead with price hikes on thousands of drugs, many well over 10 percent.