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Comment by jmclnx | Hacker News Reader

>Unlike radio alerts, they can also contain an embedded hyperlink to guide the recipient to helpful information within seconds of receiving the alert; given that 85% of Americans with a cell phone own a smartphone

Really stupid quote, who paid for the article. If an emergency, people may need to travel in their auto. Am I suppose to play with my Cell Phone while driving ?

Also if a weather issue will Cell Towers work ? How will your Cell Battery get charged. Real dumb thinking. AM Radio signals can be heard many hundreds of miles, some even a thousand miles.

So yes, to me AM is a must for dire emergencies.

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Your comment is so true it hurts. I’m a puerto rican who lived through Hurricane Maria in the island in 2017. The hurricane took out our entire power grid and multiple cell towers for months. After the hurricane the only form of communication in my area was a single radio station and my family could only listen using car radios. Cell service took months to restore in my area. I just remember hearing that lonely radio host’s voice every day for over a week with devastation in his voice as he shared the news coming in of the disaster.

For us, the hurricane was literally an apocalyptic event and I can’t imagine trying to keep my sanity if we didn’t have radios or any communication. I can’t imagine anywhere in the US going through that either.

As a fellow Puerto Rican who also endured this, wholeheartedly agree

In a total disaster, the only thing barely working is AM radio. I remember even during the hurricane listening to the only radio station available in AM. Their broadcast room was flooding, they were running on a generator and they were still broadcasting and reporting what was going on.

Thinking about it today, listening to that radio station was terrifying. I remember they were taking calls from people almost about to drown from flooding, clamoring for any sort of emergency response… which was unlikely to arrive. It was an apocalyptic moment.

To your last comment. I’m sorry this happened. You are part of the US. It was a tragedy upon a tragedy to watch how the nation let you down.

I also like the implication that 15% of Americans without smartphones are just unworthy of continuing to live in disaster situations.

Maybe it's harsh but if you can't be bothered to get equipment necessary for survival why should anyone else care?

What I'd like to see is a polling effort to see what percent of people have and know how to use their AM radio, vs percent with smart phones.

A quick google suggests 87% of the world's population has a smart phone. Less than that percent of people own a car (cause kids dont have cars, maybe access to a car is sufficient?)

Of course all this also comes down to resiliency and the better question of "Why not both?" -- a quick search on alibaba suggests you can get an AM radio for about $2, I doubt it adds more than $2 to a car manufacturer's cost (fully loaded with engineers parts distribution etc)

Other articles on this topic I’ve read mention EMI being a problem, and so I suspect it’s more than $2. For example, from the Verge in March:

> Ford was joined by BMW, Mazda, Polestar, Rivian, Tesla, Volkswagen, and Volvo in staking out the position that AM radio is incompatible with EVs, citing electromagnetic interference from the powertrain. Indeed, Tesla made this same argument when it removed AM radio from its vehicles back in 2018.

> According to a Vice article from 2016, the problem is when the interference gets picked up by the radio:

>> EVs are powered by a rechargeable battery, electric motor, and a frequency converter that controls how much power the car’s electrical motors put out by turning voltage on and off thousands of times a second, basically chopping up energy. This process causes electromagnetic interference that gets picked up by the radio.

I’m in favor of AM radios in cars

Mitsubishi Electric failed to ship AM car radio. it seems that it's not very easy part. https://www.mitsubishielectric.com/news/2020/pdf/1106.pdf

If it requires more EMI shielding that's a good thing. EM interference isn't just a problem for the car itself. But whatever is around it too.

I have a Tesla from that timeframe and it has an am radio and it just works. Somehow they managed this in 2012. Others can do it too. Software is not always easy but we persist.

EM Shielding is not high-tech by the way, so it's something that could always be done.

What is needed is simply using quality metal cans, shielded cables, metal braided tape etc.

The problem is not the tech. It's cost savings.

If you've ever had to try to explain something to someone on how to use a smartphone in a rush, it can be absolutely painful.

Whereas in an emergency situation the cop can lean in the window, turn the car radio on to the correct AM frequency, and tell the driver to listen for updates.

If you need someone to explain to you why you should care about other human beings, you might be the problem.

That's not what I said though is it? I said if someone cannot be bothered to do the bare minimum to survive why should anyone care about that plight? I didn't say if someone (physically / mentally) cannot do the bare minimum. It's like if you're starving to death and there's a perfectly prepared meal right in front of you. It's healthy, free, and clean. All you have to do is eat it. Should anyone care if you don't eat it and suffer the consequences? No.

Smartphones are certainly not "necessary for survival" by any means.

I didn't mention smartphones. I said equipment necessary for survival.

Because you can't fucking afford it. Not everybody makes 7 figures.

I don't agree with previous post but I don't make 7 figures and still own both a car and a phone.

In the US, avg income is something like 55k - so 5.5 figures?, but most people manage a car and phone. But we can't design society assuming everyone has one of course.

The smartphone is a government spy device so its not surprising they want to make more reasons to get one.

So if a disaster strikes and we meet and i have more equipment than you do I will be sure to remind you of this post as i walk away leaving you desperate.

They probably live with or around other people who have smartphones. The people without smartphones tend to be either really young children living with parents or really old living in nursing homes.

Or older people who dislike technology.

The people who live in areas prone to natural disaster all own portable radios specifically because other forms of getting info are unreliable. Your edge cases aren't something that needs to be addressed because the people involved have already addressed them without resorting to "autos".

Indeed. An AM radio for emergencies should be part of your emergency kit, not your car. If you can't use your car because there's no fuel, but you need to move, say evacuate, that AM radio in your car is no longer useful for getting info.

There are alerts that I'd like to receive on my cellphone, but where I live I will be spammed with persistent, loud alerts that genuinely are disruptive to my life. Constant amber alerts for places hundreds of miles away. The last message I received was an all out manhunt looking for someone who had shot a cop over 150miles away on the other side of my metropolitan area. After that I turned off emergency alerts completely. They bothered 7 million people with that alert alone.

If my phone only told me of tornado warnings, hurricane warnings, evacuation orders, etc I'd leave it on all the time. I'd like to know these things, but I can't have both knowledge of these alerts and sanity due to local government's irresistible appetite for bothering me every time something barely news worthy happens.

Keep in mind that the article is about what a "trade group" wants. Trade groups are about what a narrow spectrum of society wants. They have their interest which is rarely the same as what's best for our society as a whole. I ,for one, will ignore the information in this article. It's not useful to me.

> to me AM is a must for dire emergencies

I agree with this specific part, but you haven't explained why you think it needs to be built into your car instead of just having a standalone radio that you can carry with you.

Here is a real question: why are there not radio receivers in smartphones? We have hardware to pickup all six of the positioning constellations but there's no radio? Phones are plenty large enough to fit in an AM, FM, and TV antenna, and at minimum would be valuable for emergency reports.

Many smartphones do have FM radio receivers, they just don't include an app to use them.

The financial incentive just isn't there given that people will be using Spotify, Youtube, Netflix, etc.

It's actually hard to fit an FM antenna inside a phone. A quarter wave antenna is 2.5 feet long. Most phones with radio tuners required you to plug in headphones, and used the headphone cable as an antenna!

I recall that my wired earphone/headphone acts as an antenna for the LG v20 but I think it was for FM but no AM. I can't check again because I removed the stock OS for LineageOS.

I live in a market that doesn’t have local AM stations, so short of lightning strikes and transmission line RF noise, I don’t have much to listen to.

I do get DX stations from the US due to ionospheric prop, but this would be useless in a life-or-limb situation, or if there was EMP.

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