[HN Gopher] Congress fights to keep AM radio in cars
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Congress fights to keep AM radio in cars
        
       Author : giuliomagnifico
       Score  : 54 points
       Date   : 2024-10-05 09:47 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.niemanlab.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.niemanlab.org)
        
       | cranberryturkey wrote:
       | SF Giants are still aired on AM radio -- that's about all I use
       | AM for these days.
        
         | 082349872349872 wrote:
         | We've deprecated FM already; it should disappear either end of
         | this year or in a couple of years (I haven't been following
         | very closely; I don't listen to it either).
        
           | illini1 wrote:
           | FM radio has not been deprecated, where did you hear that?
           | And the infrastructure is not disappearing any time soon.
        
             | londons_explore wrote:
             | Norway shut down FM in 2023. Switzerland will shut it down
             | in 2026. Various other governments are choosing dates -
             | it's clear it's going away soon.
        
               | cj wrote:
               | Stupid question, but what do you listen to in the car
               | without FM?
               | 
               | Surely playing music doesn't require that you you connect
               | your phone to your car?
        
               | londons_explore wrote:
               | All cars in Europe support DAB (digital radio) for the
               | last ~5 years by law.
               | 
               | Pretty much all cars also support bluetooth, USB sticks,
               | and some still have Aux in. Some support various internet
               | radio/music (spotify etc). Most cars support Android
               | Auto/Carplay, wired and wireless, giving you access to
               | anything your phone supports.
        
               | trinix912 wrote:
               | But Norway and Switzerland are two countries where I'd
               | assume you don't see as many 20 year old cars as you do
               | in the opposite parts of Europe. Many cars since the
               | early 2000s don't have those standardized boxy stereos
               | you could just swap anymore. You can make the point that
               | people can just tune in through their phone but most
               | people won't go through the hassle every time they sit in
               | a (company owned, for example) car. I doubt FM is going
               | away this decade, perhaps even longer, for most of the
               | world. As for Europe, there's also Romania with their
               | longwave AM broadcasts.
        
               | Tor3 wrote:
               | Norway still have local FM radios. It's just the big
               | public and commercial stations which were forced to move
               | to DAB. When that's said, I believe there are fewer and
               | fewer local stations available.
        
           | londons_explore wrote:
           | The FM bands are more commercially 'interesting', because
           | they're wider. One traditional FM band can fit tens of
           | digital radio stations in, via DAB or DRM or HD radio etc.
           | 
           | AM bands aren't very useful for modern tech because you need
           | huge antennas, can't do MIMO or squeeze much data in, etc.
        
             | SoftTalker wrote:
             | Yes if you remember back to pre-digital era, there were
             | maybe half a dozen FM stations in most areas. Even without
             | "preset" buttons you could tune them almost by memory by
             | how far you had to spin the dial. Now there are dozens of
             | FM stations, often low power but it seems like almost every
             | 0.2 frequency increment has something.
        
         | SoftTalker wrote:
         | AM is mostly news, talk, and sports for many years now. When I
         | was a kid most new cars didn't even have FM radios yet and the
         | AM stations were more varied, many played music, top 40, etc.
        
       | 486sx33 wrote:
       | Well, I love finding new and different FM stations while
       | traveling. I confess I haven't listened to AM in years, in the
       | cities there is often a lot of interference...
       | 
       | That being said, they should be required to have better shielding
       | on their electric motors
        
       | zephyreon wrote:
       | I appreciate that people still find AM radio useful, nostalgic,
       | etc. This feels like something that should not be regulated. Let
       | auto manufacturers decide to include it or not, consumers will
       | vote with their wallets. I doubt most people will miss AM radio
       | all that much.
        
         | hinkley wrote:
         | What's the total bandwidth of the AM band? Does it make sense
         | to reclaim it for wide area wireless networking?
        
           | pfdietz wrote:
           | The width of the AM radio band in the US is just a shade over
           | 1 MHz, so there's not much room.
        
           | Mr-Frog wrote:
           | It's about 1MHz. Signals can propagate pretty far due to
           | ionospheric interactions, which could be a positive or
           | negative effect depending on your intentions.
        
         | swatcoder wrote:
         | When living in the unassailed peace and prosperity of a Western
         | society in the post-Cold War era, it's very easy to forget that
         | profound security and emergency crises are still likely to
         | occur sooner or later.
         | 
         | Preserving the viability of simple radio circuits that might
         | receive public safety messages and the towers that can
         | broadcast to them is a concern that operates on a different
         | level than "will it make the car cheaper" or "who even listens
         | to AM"
         | 
         | A lot of the systems and technologies that we've grown used to
         | and rely on for our daily needs are extremely capable but also
         | extremely fragile and brittle. Keeping backstop technologies
         | from being lost altogether is fairly cheap and might make a
         | significant difference if and when crises do arise.
        
           | uberman wrote:
           | A portable AM radio costs 10 bucks. Should we also mandate
           | that cars come with first aid kit, a flashlight or
           | defibrillator?
        
             | LeoPanthera wrote:
             | You think you're making a joke, but many countries do
             | regulate that cars come with basic safety equipment. France
             | is just one example.
        
               | uberman wrote:
               | Germany may require a first aid kit but it is not
               | required in France. In either case, that argument is
               | moot. We are talking about the USA.
        
             | uni_rule wrote:
             | Wouldn't be a terrible idea.
        
             | SoftTalker wrote:
             | I'm guessing not defibillators but many countries require
             | emergency first aid kits, hazard triangle markers/flares,
             | fire extinguishers, spare bulbs, etc. to be carried in the
             | car.
        
               | jessriedel wrote:
               | I also think the marginal cost of making a FM radio an
               | AM/FM radio is less than $10. Probably more like $1?
        
               | SoftTalker wrote:
               | Yes an AM receiver is extremely simple.
        
             | Swizec wrote:
             | > Should we also mandate that cars come with first aid kit
             | 
             | Yes actually. Where I'm from cars are required to have a
             | first aid kit and everyone who has a driver's license needs
             | to do a first aid course.
             | 
             | You'll be at the scene of an accident you witness waaaaaay
             | sooner than the ambulance. This stuff saves lives.
        
             | cassepipe wrote:
             | That would not adress at all the point of the comment you
             | are responding to : Even though it costs 10 bucks, there
             | won't be any to buy if no one had use for them and when you
             | may not be able to go the store buy a radio when the
             | emergency happens.
        
             | detaro wrote:
             | Requiring first aid kits to be carried in cars is a fairly
             | common thing. And for a radio which needs power, is useful
             | while the car is moving, ... it makes quite a bit of sense
             | for it to be built in instead of being a required "you need
             | to buy and carry this on your own" item
        
               | uberman wrote:
               | The issue is that lots of things might be useful, be in
               | the USA we dont typically mandate useful.
        
             | jemmyw wrote:
             | Having an AED in every car would be really nice.
        
               | dylan604 wrote:
               | Just put a couple of leads from the starter. That should
               | apply a good enough jolt
        
             | hotspot_one wrote:
             | > we also mandate that cars come with first aid kit.
             | 
             | This is standard in Europe. Yes, we should. Small, light
             | weight, low cost, and "it's better to have it and not need
             | it than to need it and not have it".
             | 
             | And tire jack/spare tire, and a reflector vest.
        
               | ta1243 wrote:
               | I had a puncture in a hire car a couple of years ago and
               | was distressed to find they no longer bother with spare
               | tyres - at least in the UK. Not sure if this is some
               | money saving escapade, or if it's because most drivers no
               | longer knows how to change a wheel.
               | 
               | Instead had to wait hours for a tow truck and a
               | replacement tyre.
               | 
               | Vest and first aid kit cost like EUR15, absolutely should
               | have them - although I'm not convinced the typical "cut
               | finger" first aid kit would be much help. Sure if you
               | knick yourself changing your wheel (which of course you
               | don't do any more), but I wonder what level of injury
               | it's useful for when looking at a typical crash.
        
           | jalk wrote:
           | If we are worried about emergency broadcasts, perhaps we
           | should focus on portable solar/crank driven radios, instead
           | of relying on one being bolted to your car, which in new cars
           | also requires the entire car entertainment system to be
           | working. And I'm not sure I'd risk going to my car, when the
           | zombies are outside my front door.
        
             | trinix912 wrote:
             | When the power goes out, the car radio is the radio that
             | works for most people. If we're talking emergency
             | broadcasting, car AM radio is one of the more battle tested
             | failsafe options.
        
         | ysavir wrote:
         | "Voting with your wallet" works for small and frequent
         | purchases. The bigger and less frequent the purchase, the less
         | impact it has.
        
           | flaminHotSpeedo wrote:
           | Especially for things like cars where there's very few
           | options and most of the auto industry does the same thing.
           | 
           | If you have even a single constraint outside the "industry
           | norm" (like a manual transmission in the US, or potentially
           | in the future an AM radio) you are all but guaranteed to have
           | to give up nice to have features and/or pay a lot more
        
           | cvoss wrote:
           | Exactly. And especially when the feature makes up only a tiny
           | fraction of the whole feature set and production cost of the
           | product, consumers are entirely at the mercy of the
           | manufacturers. I'm not going to buy a different make over
           | this. I'm just going to tolerate it unhappily. In the extreme
           | case, manufacturers know that they could get away with
           | dropping this kind of feature even if literally everybody
           | wanted it.
           | 
           | In my software development experience, companies invoke this
           | line of reasoning all the time.
        
         | bobthepanda wrote:
         | AM is useful in emergency situations, like the hurricane that
         | wiped out Appalachia a week ago. The range of FM is shorter, so
         | it's more likely to be affected by the disaster.
        
         | anonexpat wrote:
         | That didn't work out very well for consumers buying GM cars
         | that sold their driving data out the back door to insurance
         | companies.
        
         | loeg wrote:
         | I drive in the mountains in winter and regularly see 'tune AM
         | xxxx for advisories' road signs, for example. It serves a
         | useful public safety function. How expensive is an AM tuner for
         | a manufacturer? Surely it's like, $5 or less in additional
         | COGS.
        
           | Aloha wrote:
           | The cost isn't in the radio, you have a single chip which is
           | a complete AM/FM radio - the cost is in making cars quiet
           | enough from an EMI point of view - something which, IMO, they
           | should have to do anyhow to comply with Part 15.
        
             | jessriedel wrote:
             | This seems like a super important fact for the discussion.
             | Do you have a cite that it really constrains the rest of
             | the car?
        
               | Aloha wrote:
               | "Several automakers, most notably Tesla and Ford, have
               | decided to stop putting AM radios in their electric
               | vehicles. They claim their electric motors interfere with
               | the audio quality of the signal and insist that FM and
               | satellite radio are enough."
               | 
               | https://www.cbsnews.com/news/am-radio-congress-
               | automakers/
               | 
               | I can find other references as well if you want. EMI in
               | cars has been an issue for a long time, automakers
               | however did do the needed work suppress the noise from
               | spark plugs, I do not see this as any different.
        
               | jessriedel wrote:
               | Thanks!
               | 
               | Any idea if the law requires the redesign (i.e., requires
               | that the AM radio meets some level of audio quality when
               | operating in the vehicle) or if it just requires the AM
               | radio to be present and (somewhat understandably) the
               | manufacturer don't want to include an AM radio if it
               | consistently sounds bad?
        
         | Aloha wrote:
         | We mandated UHF channel reception for televisions
         | (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-Channel_Receiver_Act)
         | 
         | I believe that mandating AM reception is perfectly reasonable -
         | as the reason given for leaving it out is because auto
         | manufacturers do not want to spend the money to reduce the EMI
         | from their vehicles.
         | 
         | The total added BOM cost to add AM to a modern radio is zero -
         | because they have a single chip that does both AM/FM.
        
           | trinix912 wrote:
           | Does that also mean that those cars could potentially be
           | responsible for tons of interference in the AM band in the
           | future?
        
             | Aloha wrote:
             | My belief? yes, it does. The motor controllers are noisy.
        
               | trinix912 wrote:
               | If so, it's interesting the FCC hasn't stepped in since
               | nearly all electronics need that certification.
        
               | chomp wrote:
               | There's two types of electronics you're referring to.
               | There's incidental radiators, like electric motors,
               | switching power supplies, etc that the FCC understands
               | that RF will be generated from, and they ask that these
               | devices merely minimize their RF.
               | 
               | Then there's Unintentional Radiators which is probably
               | what you're thinking of, which include computers and
               | other electronics, which are regulated to limit RF.
        
         | Lammy wrote:
         | It's a standardized part of the highway system in the same way
         | as the standardized lines painted on the pavement, not just
         | something to support or not-support based on current fashion.
         | The linked article does a very poor job conveying this with its
         | framing on radio-as-entertainment and on corporate
         | consolidation of radio stations. Key phrases: "Highway Advisory
         | Radio" or "Travelers Information Station", neither of which are
         | mentioned in the article.
         | 
         | Here are the technical requirements and implementation details
         | of California's (CalTrans') system, for example:
         | https://dot.ca.gov/-/media/dot-media/programs/research-innov...
         | 
         | And some general history: https://aairo.org/history.htm
        
         | hotspot_one wrote:
         | What would feel like something that should be regulated to you?
         | 
         | Keep in mind that things like hurricanes do happen
         | occasionally, and the car's AM radio might be the only working
         | communication medium...
        
         | christophilus wrote:
         | Regulations are good for enforcing national security measures
         | that the general public rarely has in mind when making a
         | purchase. I tend to have a skeptical view of regulation, but
         | this seems wise.
        
       | RobotToaster wrote:
       | The problem with digital radio is that it's all or nothing.
       | 
       | Analogue degrades gracefully, if you need to listen to the news
       | in an emergency, it doesn't matter if it sounds fuzzy.
        
         | mplewis wrote:
         | Digital radio remains working at much worse SNR than
         | intelligible fuzzy analog.
        
           | greesil wrote:
           | For comparable BER. I wonder what SNR is needed for speech to
           | be intelligible?
           | 
           | To be fair, if someone made a voice encoding only with that
           | had a lot of error correction bits, it would probably work at
           | much longer distances. Some of the codecs are 2 kilobits per
           | second for human voice? That's got to have a way better
           | margin for the same channel bandwidth than analog decoded by
           | the human brain. This way we get the digital advantage and
           | lossy compression.
        
           | hulitu wrote:
           | Citation needed.
        
             | cogman10 wrote:
             | https://opus-codec.org/demo/opus-1.5/
             | 
             | Especially for speech, there are aggressive and impressive
             | algorithms that can turn a trickle of bits into
             | understandable voice.
        
           | Tor3 wrote:
           | In my anecdotal experience I have to agree (though I dislike
           | digital radio for completely different reasons). The
           | reception is perfect everywhere around here, while FM was
           | very different, from the exact same transmitter point. The
           | same goes for UHF TV, the quality was very sensitive to the
           | exact position of the antenna on my roof, after they switched
           | to digital, using the same frequency and the same
           | transmitter, everything is perfect even though the wind has
           | turned the antenna 90 degrees. I don't bother adjusting it,
           | there's zero need.
        
         | kachapopopow wrote:
         | FM radio will still exist afaik. Nobody in my country used AM
         | for a decade now.
        
           | LeoPanthera wrote:
           | The useful range of FM is much shorter. The reason why AM
           | transmitters remain so useful in geographically large
           | countries like the USA is that you need far fewer
           | transmitters to reach everyone.
        
             | bigfishrunning wrote:
             | That has more to do with the frequency band then the
             | modulation scheme. I wonder if long range FM in the
             | ~1000khz broadcast band would make sense in the future. It
             | would get the range of AM broadcast radio with the quality
             | of FM (but it may require too much bandwidth to be
             | practical)
        
               | LeoPanthera wrote:
               | You're not wrong, but that's useless nitpicking. We're
               | not going to suddenly introduce a brand new radio
               | standard that no-one has a radio for.
               | 
               | There are literally millions of AM radios out there in
               | the US, at the already agreed frequency range. For
               | emergency broadcast uses, the increased quality of FM is
               | meaningless.
        
               | nahumba wrote:
               | The advantage of am over fm is the simplicity of the
               | electronic circuit. In am its very easy to create a
               | receiver to listen to broadcast. While an fm radio is too
               | complicated for amature electronic.
               | 
               | So i dont belive am will ever be dropped for emergency
               | radio
        
               | Tor3 wrote:
               | FM radios aren't complicated at all. And FM transmitters,
               | in particular, are extremely simple. When I was a student
               | we had a tiny one we made in an afternoon (this was
               | decades ago), we connected it to our 8-hour reel tape
               | deck and had our own music station in the car radio when
               | we drove around in the area. The advantage of AM is, as
               | was mentioned already, the lower frequency used by AM
               | which means much better coverage. FM 87MHz-108MHz is
               | almost just line of sight.
        
               | kmbfjr wrote:
               | No much to a coil, antenna and a germanium diode.
        
               | candiddevmike wrote:
               | The geranium diode is doing most of the heavy lifting.
               | Good luck building that from scratch.
        
               | kmbfjr wrote:
               | It is not useless nitpicking, it is the sole reason of
               | your argument why the 300 meter band covers more area
               | than the 3 meter band.
        
               | lolinder wrote:
               | It's useless nitpicking because in the US, AM vs FM comes
               | coupled with those frequency ranges. We're as likely to
               | get a brand new radio standard at this point as we are a
               | replacement to the NEMA connector, so the next best thing
               | is to just use the standard we already have that does the
               | job well enough.
        
               | wakawaka28 wrote:
               | I'm no expert but I think lowering the frequency far
               | below the current standard was not feasible due to the
               | frequencies and ranges being transmitted.
        
               | btbuildem wrote:
               | If I recall correctly, FM needs the higher frequency
               | carrier band to actually M the F effectively. You'd also
               | need much longer antennas for this. The amplitude-
               | modulated signal also needs far less bandwidth than a
               | frequency-modulated one, so it would not "fit" at
               | ~1000kHz because there are other reserved bands nearby.
        
           | wakawaka28 wrote:
           | FM radio is radically limited in range. You can listen to AM
           | or shortwave across a whole continent, or even across oceans.
           | With FM you're very lucky to hear something over a hundred
           | miles away. AM radio is most popular for news and talk shows,
           | and emergency broadcasts.
        
             | RHSeeger wrote:
             | When I was living in "upstate" NY (the Poughkeepsie area,
             | which isn't upstate, but that's what it's called), I would
             | regularly listen to AM stations out of NYC (close to 100
             | miles away from the broadcaster); using just the standard
             | receiver in my car.
        
           | ajsnigrutin wrote:
           | In europe, some are actively trying to kill FM radio and
           | switch to DAB... so it's coming, first the european cars,
           | then the others too.
        
           | dylan604 wrote:
           | Then whatever decision Congress makes will have no effect on
           | you
        
         | Aloha wrote:
         | Right, but digital radio is a small portion of the US market,
         | and what IBOC stuff that did happen, much of it has been turned
         | off.
         | 
         | So I dont really understand what this comment has to do with
         | the article at hand here?
        
       | bigfishrunning wrote:
       | I always thought cars ought to have a weather band receiver in
       | them, but I've never seen that feature in a factory radio.
       | 
       | As a HAM I have an amateur transceiver in my car and i find
       | weather band reception to be really useful
        
         | quantumfissure wrote:
         | I agree. Subaru did have them for a bit in the early-
         | mid-2000's. I had it in our 05 Forester. Stock radio. Our 2011
         | Outback and my mother-in-law's 2017 Forester lacks it though.
         | No clue why they removed it.
         | 
         | It was wonderful going through New England mountains trying to
         | know what the weather will do in 5 mins when it inevitably
         | changes.
        
           | jessriedel wrote:
           | Seems so cheap to include, but I guess it's the same weird
           | reasons that car manufacturers are willing to make their UI
           | baffling to save a single mechanical button.
        
           | notjulianjaynes wrote:
           | Was this stock? I do not recall this feature in either the
           | 1998 nor 2001 Subarus I drove into the ground. Seems strange
           | but not implausible it would have been briefly an option in
           | the generation after that. 2005 is about when Subarus got
           | less boxy with big plastic bumpers and crumple zones.
           | 
           | Jokingly, perhaps it was not a feature but happened
           | accidentally due to the head gaskets design on the EJ25
           | engine.
        
         | notjulianjaynes wrote:
         | I'm not sure if Truckers still use CB but on a cross country
         | road trip which involved hours being pinned in the left most
         | lane on all sides by trailers with speed governors set to 66mph
         | I recall wishing I had had the ability to communicate with the
         | drivers. It seems like this would be easy to implement from the
         | factory as well, although I suppose giving everyone with a new
         | car the abulity to speak their minds to others on the road with
         | them would a.) be less safe b.) be super annoying.
        
       | azinman2 wrote:
       | "While early radio amateurs harnessed its potential to connect
       | and inform, the era of unlicensed amateur broadcasting ended
       | during World War I due to fears that the new medium might be
       | misused to spread foreign propaganda or divisive content."
       | 
       | You gotta wonder what the congress of bygone eras would have done
       | with the current system we have of media and corporate control.
        
         | Nasrudith wrote:
         | World War 1 era media regulations isn't something to be proud
         | of or looked upon as wisdom, it is something to be deeply
         | ashamed of. These are the people who arrested pacifists and
         | brought us the abominable (in both senses) logic of fire in a
         | crowded theater for objecting to draft and involvement in a
         | foreign war of unseen proportions.
        
         | SllX wrote:
         | Yeah, imagine if a free people had been able to spread
         | information contradicting and undermining the Wilson
         | administration: https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/world-war-i-
         | american-experie...
         | 
         | (It's worth going through the whole slideshow.)
        
         | hagbard_c wrote:
         | Probably the same as some of today's politico's and law makers
         | have in mind when it comes to curbing free speech, e.g. John
         | Kerry's wish to be free from the limits the first amendment
         | puts on government restricting speech [1]: _our First Amendment
         | stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it
         | out of existence. So what we need is to win the ground, win the
         | right to govern, by hopefully winning enough votes that you're
         | free to be able to implement change_ or supreme court justice
         | Ketanji Brown-Jackson 's mournful declaration that _[the] First
         | Amendment is 'hamstringing' government from censorship_ [2]
         | 
         | [1] https://nypost.com/2024/10/02/opinion/john-kerry-says-
         | first-...
         | 
         | [2]
         | https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/justice/2926698/keta...
         | 
         | In other words, nothing has changed really in that those in
         | power are wary of technology which allows non-government
         | (controlled) entities to spread information.
        
           | azinman2 wrote:
           | Your link to KBJ is missing a ton of context that is
           | extremely reasonable and apparently in agreement with her
           | conservative peers:
           | 
           | https://reason.com/2024/03/19/hamstringing-the-
           | government-a-...
           | 
           | Even the NY post at least (shockingly) had enough context to
           | get to the further reasonable issue: we're seeing mass
           | disinformation, sometimes from foreign enemies, spread across
           | the homeland at rates never before seen, and in doing its
           | ripping apart the fabric of society. The way you're being
           | selective in these quotes is doing a disservice to the very
           | real issue at hand. This is exactly a "new medium might be
           | misused to spread foreign propaganda or divisive content."
        
       | LeoPanthera wrote:
       | Modern cars in the US, especially EVs it seems, are not only
       | dropping AM radio but also now SiriusXM satellite radio. I was
       | shocked to discover that the "Sirius" radio on many cars I have
       | been looking at recently was merely an app that streamed over the
       | cellular connection.
       | 
       | I find this mildly terrifying. In an emergency, cellular will be
       | the first to go. It doesn't even work reliably when everything is
       | well.
        
         | jessriedel wrote:
         | Yea, even if the major space powers Kesslerize all the
         | satellites (like Starlink) in low-Earth orbit, the civilian
         | geostationary sats like Sirius XM will likely be flying.
         | (Geostationary sats can, I think, only be brought down
         | individually with anti-satellite weapons, and that would
         | presumably be prohibitively expensive for all of them.)
        
         | gwbas1c wrote:
         | I think it'd be fine if Sirius didn't require a subscription.
         | The subscription nature turned it into a niche business.
         | 
         | (And gosh Sirius's salesmen are annoying a-holes when they call
         | you up to get you to subscribe. The last time I bought a car
         | with a Sirius radio I had to insist that I wouldn't get any
         | calls from Sirius to subscribe.)
        
         | maxerickson wrote:
         | Is there a realistic scenario where cell phones are down and
         | there is meaningful coordination being done over SiriusXM?
         | 
         | I don't particularly expect that there would be any effort to
         | lean on AM either.
        
           | ajsnigrutin wrote:
           | Maybe not meaningful coordination, but if the whole citys
           | power shuts down, you'd still like some news about what
           | happened, why is there no power, no internet, no nothing....
           | war? farmer plowing too deep? ddos attack on the
           | infrastructure? In such cases, having long distance
           | broadcasting service is great.
        
             | ta1243 wrote:
             | AM radio then. If you want internet, get a starlink.
        
       | zzo38computer wrote:
       | I am not as concerned that a car has AM radio than I am that AM
       | radio must continue to be available and that you must be allowed
       | to replace the radio in the car with your own that can use AM
       | radio and that the car will not interfere with your use of AM
       | radio (whether by replacing the existing radio or by using a
       | portable radio). It would be good for the car to include a radio
       | that has AM, but that isn't as important as the other things that
       | I had mentioned.
       | 
       | AM radio is good due to the simplicity, instead of forcing
       | replacing them with excessively complicated and confusing stuff
       | like many modern computers are doing.
       | 
       | I still use AM (and FM) radio. I do not have a car, but sometimes
       | use in someone else's car, and I also use it at home; the radio
       | is not only for the use in the car.
        
         | notjulianjaynes wrote:
         | I can recount from memory nearly every minute in the last like
         | 10 years I have spent listening to broadcast AM/FM radio
         | outside of a car. Nearly all of them were spent testing new
         | stereos. On one occasion I was circuit bending a Casio keyboard
         | and randomly stuck an inductor coil somewhere and it
         | accidentally made the keyboard an AM radio, Hi Fi Gilligan
         | style [1]. I may have been using the tunable capacitor from a
         | radio to mess with the clock speed as well.
         | 
         | 1. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1230840/
        
           | benoau wrote:
           | There have however been many major disasters where congestion
           | or service impaired or shut down cellular internet access, so
           | I think we do still need that lifeline... although I'd rather
           | the radios be in cell phones since they're more likely to be
           | with you and powered on in a disaster!
        
         | dylan604 wrote:
         | > the radio is not only for the use in the car.
         | 
         | this is something that I think is being overlooked.
        
       | hnpolicestate wrote:
       | I prefer the way talk sounds through AM vs digital. I realize
       | special interests and money is involved but AM radio should
       | continue to exist as some emergency communications fallback.
        
       | fmajid wrote:
       | And what about buggy whip holders? Will no one think about the
       | buggy whips?
        
       | resters wrote:
       | I've wondered for a while why cars don't simply ship with a
       | tablet sized indentation, and adapters for popular tablets to
       | connect an amplified speaker system. It appears the reason is
       | because Congress thinks it knows best what type of audio system
       | should be in a car.
       | 
       | We live in a world where do United States EV "success story" is
       | now protected by 100% tariffs on competitors.
        
       | userbinator wrote:
       | This is the most important use of AM radio in cars:
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelers%27_information_stati...
        
       | kmbfjr wrote:
       | The issue Congress is missing isn't AM radio, it is the willful
       | RFI pollution by Ford and Tesla.
       | 
       | These motors should not be causing the issue because if they
       | block AM reception in that car, they'll do it for all cars around
       | them.
        
       | Arubis wrote:
       | Always worth following the money. Major broadcasters still using
       | AM tend to be either sports or right-wing talk.
        
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