Ford to drop AM radio in new models, except commercial vehicles | Hacker News Reader

Ford to drop AM radio in new models, except commercial vehicles

freep.com

81 pointsrmason164 comments

So people driving new Ford vehicles won't be able to get weather/emergency information in the Rockies/Sierra's (and others I'm sure) along with the vast stretches of I-70/80 (and likely more) that don't have any services for long stretches. Granted the primary user for these broadcasts are over-the-road truckers who likely have other options, but it's also handy to tune into an AM station to hear the weather and road conditions when there's no usable cell service.

I keep a Baofeng VHF/UHF radio in my car now (~$22 on Amazon) to scan around when I'm stuck in traffic. It doesn't have AM, but there are VHF weather stations[0] (and military and first responder frequencies and all that - you can see how HAM nerds get into it) if you want. In theory you can also broadcast on certain frequencies with it, but you also get into FCC licensing territory with that. Overall it seems a lot more useful than an AM radio.

[0]https://www.weather.gov/nwr/station_listing

This is all well and good, but my state (Washington) actively uses specific AM stations for traffic and weather alerts. You will see signs on the freeways saying "tune to 750AM for emergency weather alerts now" (or whatever the frequency is).

Also Washington and I can tell you there are a whole lot of people here in the hinterlands of the east who are regular AM listeners for weather, the sports ball games, and various other things. I know several radio station owners in the area and have to wonder if this will be the final nail in the coffin for them.

> first responder frequencies

More and more services are moving to P25 and encrypting it:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_25

* https://www.taitradioacademy.com/topic/introduction-to-p25-e...

Many of the rural areas in my state still use AM radio, schools, community centers, small towns, and the farming migrant workers. The talk channels that report on the schools and community are AM based, not FM.

But I've switched to streaming the AM/FM, but having the AM radio is still used.

No real reason to drop AM except as a cost cutting feature, filters already exist for EV cars, and aftermarket radios work with AM without issue proving Ford is a liar.

I still buy phones with sdcard and headphone jack, at least cars I can upgrade the radio. But why buy a new car if its crippled and marked up, better buy used at this point.

WA state DOT has the highway advisory radio program where they use roadside AM transmitters for important traffic information.

> except as a cost cutting feature

how much does that save?!? I've literally built AM radios by accident.

Complete tangent, but why don't they put simple AM radio receivers (or even low power transmitters) in cell phones? Imagine the cool stuff you could do with an AM radio API!

Some phones did. FM too. Sony I think? Early-mid 2000s I'm thinking.

My Nokia N900 had an FM receiver and transmitter, I used it a few times to stream music to my old car.

That TX feature is awesome as someone who enjoys older cars.

Yeah that's so cool. I mean Bluetooth was crap back then, if it was even a thing at all. Only way you could listen to music on your existing home / car stereo without any wires.

My cellphone has FM built in also, I just have to plug in headphones. Wish I had AM, I normally just stream AM over data.

Many still do. https://www.kimovil.com/en/best-smartphones-fm-radio

I recall an HN thread in which it was claimed that in fact most phones can, but to enable it means more FCC certifications etc. Can't find it offhand; someone more knowledgeble should jump in. (I'd love such a feature myself.)

Because 0.01% of people would actually use this.

For the same reason they took out the FM radio on phone, those devices with a million antennas in them:

It makes it harder for them to sell you Apple Music, Google Music, Spotify, etc.

They used to! But you had to use wired earphones for it, because they'd use the earphone wire as the antenna.

Some phones do. I had a Motorolla G5 Plus a couple years ago, and used it often to listen to the radio on walks.

That's an excellent point. AM has more access to locals and that is important.

I wonder how many cents this will save them per car. When I can buy a Software Defined Radio module for less than a bottle of wine and some sushi that lets me listen to both AM and FM (everything below 1 GHz basically), and this module takes up less space than my smartphone, it can't be because AM radio is particularly hard to install or expensive to produce.

Seems pointless to remove, but at the same time I bet the majority of car owners these days don't really use AM that often, if they even know what it is, that is.

AM is hard to implement in EVs due to shielding requirements. Not just about being cheap, about deprecating the obsolete.

From the AM broadcasting Wikipedia page:

“Among persons aged 12-24, AM accounts for only 4% of listening, while FM accounts for 96%. Among persons aged 25-34, AM accounts for only 9% of listening, while FM accounts for 91%. The median age of listeners to the AM band is 57 years old, a full generation older than the median age of FM listeners."

EVs I get, but the article specifies that this will be removed in gas-powered vehicles, too.

New combustion vehicle sales are being phased out in many jurisdictions by 2030-2035. Might as well drop this now for supply chain and shared platform efficiencies considering how fast use is trailing off.

Those deadlines aren't going to be realized. They're just a classist attempt at virtue signaling, completely detached from reality.

They force supply chains to reconfigure regardless of public opinion. If legacy auto continues to build combustion vehicles they can’t sell, it’s a death sentence. They already have a debt load exceeding safety while trying to move to EV production at scale.

But sure, ignore nation state regulations as a multinational at your own peril. Not my debt to service in a rising interest rate environment.

https://thedriven.io/2023/03/30/legacy-auto-faces-disaster-i...

You can't push demand down people's throats even if they are receptive to EVs. Where are renters going to plug in their state mandated vehicles? Homeowners who don't have a secure place to plug in? People who can't afford electrical upgrades? Sucks to be them, go ride a bus?

There is still a used car market ? Alternative to not buying a new cheap gas powered vehicle is not public transit

There is a gas-user density threshold below which stations stop being viable. It will be interesting seeing the map of gas-station deserts develop and expand over the coming decades.

As a daily driver of hydrogen fuel cell vehicle I experience that today, if I can manage with just 45 pumps in all of California some constantly broken down, and still do 15,000 miles/year it should be fine even if many pumps disappear.

Gas stations may become primarily supercharger points, and pump maybe in one corner as a legacy, i doubt it would completely disappear as long as old vehicles still ply the roads in numbers.

From public transit to government subsidy for people economically unable to make the change there are many policies we can effect to solve this problem. Indirect subsidy of Gas[1] should not be one of them

[1] Without a carbon tax on emissions we are all already effectively subsidizing the costs of climate related economic impact of floods, droughts, forest fires so on.

Used car prices are already skyrocketing. And with all the manufacturers having already stopped making their cheaper cars, it's only going to get worse. Add in forced EV adoption, and demand for used cars will go up even higher.

The Japanese and Germans are resisting the ICE phase out in their own ways. The Germans aren't ready to walk away from their vaunted automotive history so they forced efuels to be acceptable for 2035. But all those efuel vehicles will run hydrocarbon petrol just fine. Toyota and Honda are both dragging their feet on ICE retirement. Toyota has said they have no plans to give up ICE production, even after the recent CEO change. Honda is quieter but they both sell into markets that aren't going to stop wanting ICEs: they can't afford BEVs.

I would bet it’s even harder to shield gasoline vehicles. But this was solved a lifetime ago.

"shielding" kind of glosses over that the components in EVs tend to emit more electromagnetic interference (EMI).

This article seems to be a nice overview of the issue:

https://www.radioworld.com/columns-and-views/guest-commentar...

I guess implementing a receiver that is isolated from the interference can cost more than a few cents though (because it's the whole signal path).

AM HD is digital and much less impacted.

GMRS radios also barely with within an EV vehicle surprisingly. Was only a few car lengths behind friend on a road trip, couldn't talk to them over GMRS radio, but I could pick up truck and boat traffic from miles away! We had to go back to using our phones to coordinate pitstops!

The AM/FM radios are jellybean standardized components that have existed for decades.

Winter in the mountains where FM doesn't work, AM is essential.

No one really knows the listenership stats for radio, the method used to come up with numbers is appalling.

True. It could be vastly lower than this, right?

Those usage numbers are actually higher than I expected, but maybe that is because they are framed in relation to FM and usage of FM is way down in those demos too.

Many farming communities only have AM radio for the migrant workers. So Tesla/Ford might actually be cutting off low income, non english speaking farming immigrants from access to local radio in their own language and community.

But they they probably are not driving EVs like tesla, still not cool thou.

Ford cutting it out of their f150 work trucks seems to be rather bad for many communities.

This is the most convoluted way of disparaging Tesla I’ve ever seen. Congratulations

pointless? the ford will come with a 30 day subscription to xm..

My Honda did… I was pre signed up for my convenience. and apparently they gave XM my address too because I started getting regular mail when the trial ran out..

This sounds regressive and pointless. FM/AM vs. FM radio has to be pennies. In some mountainous areas, only AM radio works.

It should be required by regulation, to be frank. Many places still have emergency broadcasts on AM radio.

especially considering a backup camera and an accompanying display became a requirement in the states, AM radio would be nothing

If we're going to regulation route, we could also require those emergency broadcasts to move to FM.

The cost of issuing new regulations by the government is far lower than the cost to retrofit FM hardware to all stations.

FM frequencies do not propogate in nearly the same way as MW do.

I wonder if it's less cost and more about a support angle.

If they get a mere handful of customers tying up service people on "the AM radio was crystal clear on my 1992 Camry with manual-everything, it must be my new $60k electric car being busted!" it's probably more costly than telling the software developers to deselect a build flag.

I thought about that too. An external or internal socketed module would turn an AM UPGRADE into at least $100 in labor costs unless it's done by the RADIO OEM. Just put AM in the darn radio guys!

As a long-time Ford customer and fan of AM radio this annoys me greatly. My current radio died and I've been using phone apps and it isn't a very pleasant experience. The apps are horrible, you have to listen to two minutes of commercials before hearing the station and then they crash often even on wi-fi forcing you to listen to the commercials all over again.

I know that Tesla has never had AM radio in their cars. But both GM and Chrysler have developed filtering for their EV's and have announced they will not be dropping AM radio.

That’s the way things seem to be going in cars. The simple and uncomplicated analog systems of the past are being replaced with more complicated electronic versions. The benefits are there but they come along with new fail modes that are harder to fix.

Except it’s false. My Model S plays AM radio just fine.

Edit: my Model S is a 2013, and apparently they’ve been phasing out AM on new cars since 2018 or so. The original point (that Tesla never used it) is still wrong tho.

There's a Cadillac where the glove box open button is an option on the main car touchscreen.

I don't get this at all. What was wrong with a simple mechanical latch with a mechanical key? It doesn't need power, there's little to break, and little to understand.

There's so much absolute garbage getting thrown on these cars, like electric/electronic emergency brakes. Who in their right mind thinks this is a good idea?

If you like radio, why haven't you bought one? There are lots of options under $25 on amazon.

Tesla hasn’t ever had AM radio in their cars? What are you talking about?

I just right now double-checked and my Tesla Model S plays AM radio just fine. (EDIT: Granted it’s a 2013 but still.)

They haven’t had them for a while though.

The exact same vehicle sold through a commercial contract will include AM. So this is really just trying to force people to pay to stream the internet feed of all of these radio stations.

Jim Farley is going off the deep end. If he’s not careful the Ford family is going to can him, and he can live in a van down by the river, with no AM radio in it.

They could drop everything if they brought back the double DIN slot. Such a simple solution but it doesn't jive with the times. We really can't have nice compatibility anymore.

If phones could do AM/FM, then all I'd really need is a dumb pass-through to it, skipping the head unit altogether.

Here in Vancouver the real-time traffic and news channels are all on AM. How would I be able to listen to those stations without AM?

A crystal set for your dashboard, probably.

My '23 EV gets its time from GPS but for some blasted reason, doesn't account for daylight savings. I have to toggle the "daylight savings" clock setting twice a year.

I moved to AZ because I was sick of flipping that switch.

I’m actually wondering how long those stations will survive, given that routing around traffic bottlenecks is becoming the domain of smartphone apps.

Certainly for a while. I am also in the Pacific Northwest (US side) and we too have these stations but the signs on the freeway flash lights when the stations are giving _emergency_ information -- think floods, rockslides, avalanches...

I think Norway already turned their analog radio network of (so AM and FM) in favour of digital. So the answer would be the same in both cases: the broadcaster has to update to newer technology to keep listeners.

Considering how much of their sales are pickups, which are used in rural and mid sized cities, it will be interesting to see how much impact there is, or if there's another reasonable way to tie in AM. AM goes very long distances and this makes driving a Ford a much smaller world.

I wonder if there is a large difference in audience. Pickups are kind of just minivans for today’s smaller families, with a little different cultural associations. Large cities are packed full of them.

The long distance of AM is nice for high school sports. Every now and then I try to tune a little high school football in on the car radio, and it’s niche enough programming that it’s not as if I can change to a different station carrying it when I go out of range. Even pro sports I prefer AM for, who knows why.

I do not understand this. To me, it just screams "anti-consumer".

Surely, the components are already included in the radio unit. Why remove it?

Wow, count on another $4,200 in net income next year. Seriously, how expensive is an AM radio?

Genuine question: why isn’t traffic info/emergency broadcast moved to FM in North America? Is it mostly tradition/inertia in the use of FM, or also technical such as long distances being somewhat cheaper to cover? I’m not sure if a car I have owned has AM or whether there are any stations on there. The modes I can switch between are called “FM” and “Bluetooth” (but I’m sure the same model would have AM in NA).

AM goes MUCH further than FM.

And the USA is friggin' HUGE.

It's no bigger than Europe and individual states correspond quite well to a European state in terms of density and population. So size and density alone doesn't really explain all the differences between Europe and the US, nor in this case. For the sparser areas one can easily compare the northern half of Sweden to e.g. Idaho (northern half of Sweden has the same area as Idaho but half the population at 1M). There is FM coverage behind every tree. Don't ask me what the cost difference would be if that had been solved with one big AM transmitter instead of dozens of FM transmitters. But at least the emergency broadcasts will be stereo.

My very first electronics project as a child was making a crystal radio with my dad. The wonder of being able to listen to AM stations with no power! Vale AM!

When I read the story about GM dropping CarPlay, I thought to myself that it’s just the beginning. All or most manufacturers are going to pull crap like that - all that indignant postering about never buying a GM will be in vein. Soon it’ll be: “I’m never buying GM, Ford, Toyota, Chevrolet…”

There’s got to be a Bluetooth capable AM radio you can sync up if you really need this.

Yep. You can get a $10 AM radio with a 3.5mm plug, a $10-20 bluetooth transmitter, and a 3.5mm male to male cable and that'll do it.

Still though, AM radio is something you don't plan to use until you're in trouble usually. Most people tend to not plan ahead like that.

No idea how widespread AM is across the pond but during the 23 years I have spent living in Poland, never have I listened to an AM radio station and trust me, I even intentionally tried to find such stations.

Germany here. The only time I listened to AM was when I built my first fuzz pedal and amplified radio instead of the guitar.

Seems like a mistake. I suspect there is a large overlap in the people who buy religiously domestic and the people who religiously listen to AM radio.

As long as it's possible to buy third party radios, my car will have an AM radio no matter what Ford (or any other manufacturer) decrees.

In the US, this appears to predominantly impact rural listeners, conservatives, and religious folks, who tend to be large consumers of AM talk radio.

According to publicly available demographic information, they are also more likely to be Ford owners.

Isn’t it basically free to include? Why drop it?

The HV components emit more electromagnetic interference, which you hear on a cheap AM radio.

They can mitigate it, but probably not for near zero cost.

In the US the car manufacturers learned that they can increase their profits by selling more expensive cars to fewer wealthy customers. The average Joe will most likely never be able to afford a new car again.

https://www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/articles/14601168

More and more nowadays I'm wondering how the "average Joe" is surviving in America at all.

Most are barely getting by. Most can't afford sudden major emergencies (car breakdowns, medical expenses, accidents, etc.) and most are living paycheck to paycheck.

[Narrator: They’re not.]

The same way they survive in places like Somalia.

It wouldn't remotely surprise me if we don't see a lot of late 90's to mid 2000's vehicles getting run and rebuilt for a long time, kind of like Cuba. Barring perhaps the crashworthiness, for areas with no rust, it's kind of amazing to see how many older GM trucks of that era are still running down the road (I know I've got a couple myself).

It's hard to imagine ponying up many tens of thousands of dollars for a new truck, when they don't really do anything better (or are often worse) than what you have, and the cost of overhauling an older truck still comes out pretty favorably. I wonder if GM is cursing how easy and well understood it is to rebuild and improve a 4L60E or a small block chevy?

The popularity of GMT800s has exploded for this reason

I get the feeling this doesn’t just apply to cars. Too many wealthy people and a huge gap is a cancer

The average Joe has always bought used cars.

Here is a youtube video explaining why electric cars negatively affect AM radios and why companies like Tesla are phasing them out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVHwQn9PRUw

I'm sure they are going to keep the spying onstar module and its anthenna. Unlike AM radio, onstar has no use to the driver, but it has so many uses for everyone else.

...OnStar is GM technology, not Ford.

Perhaps the cost of licensing fees for the AM stereo system used?

AM Stereo : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AM_stereo

I would guess most cars don't even implement it.

Honestly, AM and FM radio are antiquated shit.

Radio should be digital, and preferably lossless.

There’s no reason Stereo FLAC, 16 bit 44.1khz audio at about 1000 kbps couldn’t be delivered.

Many FM and some AM stations do broadcast in digital.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-band_on-channel

A much better option would be Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Radio_Mondiale

DRM is IBOC. That is mentioned on the page I linked.

No, DRM is Not IBOC.

AM & FM IBOC is (IMHO) a poor chimera of digital and analog broadcasting, it has licensing fees, and other issues.

Pure DRM is licensing free and fully digital.

Digital Radio : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_radio

I love DAB (digital radio) in the UK!!! Unless you’re in … town … or … then … lucky … hear … word.

(It’s all or nothing. When the signal is low it cuts out all the time)

Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB((+)) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Audio_Broadcasting

In the UK is VHF, manly line-of-sight to the transmitter (with a small amount to signal bending).

See DRM : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35419213

My boomer father, who drives Fords pretty much exclusively, loves to tell me how bad it is that the Tesla I drive doesn't have AM radio. Meanwhile, I didn't even notice and couldn't care less.

Well, your father cares for a good reason about AM reception when driving through the Rockies/Sierras in snowy weather.

I think the discussion here is missing something. The issue isn't "shielding" the radio. Modern power electronics, including Hybrid/EV drivetrains and modern electronic transmissions, produce in-band interference for broadcast AM. If you shield the radio, you're blocking the _signal_, as well as the noise. The only solution is to shield the power system (including the drive motor). This can add significant cost in both engineering and production, and interfere with thermal management (gaps let out hot air and RF!). Of course, with enough effort, anything can be shielded, but most EMI emissions masks I work with only go down to 30Mhz! Single MHz is below the range of "RF" and within the range of "Power Electronics" in the minds of modern engineers.

The real issue here is that while FM made the switch to hybrid Analog+Digital, AM is still living in the past. The technology has not changed in literally a century. The FCC has authorized hybrid AM operation, but there hasn't been any real adoption. We have 100 years of signal processing magic, and it would be so much cheaper for car manufacturers to include a single chip than to properly shield drivetrains just for AM radio backwards compatibility.

We should have spread-spectrum orthogonal-multiplexed radio beamed to the entire country from space. 100 geo-coded channels, and your car automatically plays the one for the region you're in. Adapt or die, but the high power future isn't going to wait up for AM.

ICE engines have been try to pollute AM bands since forever with their ignitions and other high voltage discharge systems -- that's why they're usually fairly shielded.

HID headlights created huge interference problems on the earliest cars to equip them -- now they're shielded.

The early Prius model owners could famously tell when the ICE engine was about to begin operating due to the ICE ignition system beginning charge and causing AM interference, which then became much more pronounced upon activation and ignition discharge.

I guess my point is that these were all tremendously noisy sources that got remediated -- I worry for the RF noise floor across the board when companies are no longer incentivized to chase such gremlins.

One of the many sources of generated noise that interferes with AM reception.

Broadband over Power Lines (BPL) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadband_over_power_lines

>On August 3, 2006, FCC adopted a memorandum opinion and an order on broadband over power lines,

giving the go-ahead to promote broadband service to all Americans.

The order rejected calls from aviation, business, commercial, amateur radio and other sectors of spectrum users,

to limit or prohibit deployment until further study was completed.

FCC chief Kevin Martin said that BPL.

"holds great promise as a ubiquitous broadband solution that would offer a viable alternative,

to cable, digital subscriber line, fiber, and wireless broadband solutions".

What good would digital AM do here? Instead of an analog channel filled with engine noise you'd have a bitstream with a high error rate. Neither one is letting your signal through.

And 100 channels? There are 4484 AM licenses in the US, 6686 FM commercial, and 4207 FM non-commercial. (https://www.fcc.gov/media/broadcast-station-totals) That would completely eliminate the last struggling bit of local media ownership.

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