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Comment by skullone | Hacker News Reader

But it's a feature that comes in quite handy, for only a few dollars of manufacturing cost. I tune to road status AM radio all the time when driving over the mountains

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A few dollars in manufacturing costs per vehicle easily adds up to millions.

And a few tens of thousands of dollars of revenue per vehicle adds up to billions.

There are a bunch of example replies about how AM is used as a direct life safety device and you and others seem to keep simping for a corp’s ability to profit.

Literally choosing profit over people.

AM is not replaced by FM, Cell, wifi, iphone 14 sat emerg use… it’s a device that also states use in service to the citizens.

It should be mandatory due to the nature of Khz bandwith signal propagation over the Mhz fm band.

Ford already made the decision for you. If you need an AM radio, bring your own. They are about $10 on Amazon. Most people don’t need it. As a bonus, you can take an AM radio with you as opposed to leaving it in your car, so when you have to run away and hide under some bridge to escape a tornado you could have the radio with you.

>Ford already made the decision for you. If you need an AM radio, bring your own.

Alternatively, simply don't buy a Ford....

Or buy an old car. Since it appears to be impossible to buy new cars that don't phone home or have those horrific touch screen console displays, this is what I expect I'll be doing for the rest of my life.

What's interesting about this is that the cost of an AM radio is essentially nothing, Ford owners (specifically trucks) are often very conservative which includes their views on truck design (see past Ford updates and reporting), and often rural - so exactly the people who are most likely to use AM radio. So Ford must either be clueless in alienating their customers or believe that the tradeoffs are worth this move.

>decision

Right. I get that. I think it’s a misguided decision. But I get it. Because I understand that profit is their only driving motivation (no pun intended).

What I don’t grok is how many replies there are here quite literally picking on those people who demonstrate legitimate life safety uses for the AM band, Some of those by the State providing a service.

Yes, do not buy this if you decide you need AM as a backup. I get that.

Heck, I already won’t buy cars that can be disabled remotely. “Old man yells at cloud” memes aside.

Just because a company’s motivations don’t match what a niche customer wants, doesn’t mean their only motivation is profit. They certainly have other motivations beyond profit, just none that you may care about. Consider the Ford Bronco, where one of the motivations was to beat the Wrangler. Given their engineering decisions, profit was certainly not the only motivation.

> only motivation

You fail to understand what “companies” are under capitalism - they exist for profit, only.

> beat the wrangler

For .. fun? That’s not gonna make shareholders happy.

They did it for profit.

engineering decisions in corporations are driven by profit.

Not to be pedantic. But, in my opinion, it’s important to *not humanize corporations* because they are not humans.

On the contrary, corporations are nothing but humans. Thousands of humans working together to achieve human goals. And if what humans mostly want is profit, then corporations will want profit, but occasionally they want other things too. Power, revenge, prestige.

You’re applying human emotion to the actions of humans within a corporation and sure, that tracks.

From a purely mathematical shareholder ROI standpoint, a “continuous expansion” facet of capitalism, and the purchase of labor from humans who do not themselves own or control the corporate decisions - there is only ever ROI that is considered.

Ford is infamous for this kind of stuff, see the Ford Pinto:

> Ever wonder what your life is worth in dollars? Perhaps $10 million? Ford has a better idea: $200,000.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/1977/09/pinto-madness/

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