I wouldn't get your hopes up. Depending on how the final bill is written, simply equipping the vehicle with an AM radio might be enough to satisfy the regulation, even if the reception is so poor as to make it almost unusable.
It seems it would be for most situations. If it's emergency info, everyone would need to hear it. Most roads either don't have a shoulder (rural, semi rural), or have too high of a volume for the shoulder to handle all the traffic (multilane highways, city streets). Even if the stops were temporary, you'd end up with massive traffic jams that would likely make any emergency worse.
But I don't think the lemon law allows for work around anyways - you bought a car that is (will be) required by law to have AM radio, and that feature does not function when driving the car.
Just keep kicking the can until the last ~4k AM stations in the US close.
I've been exploring the AM dial since this issue first arose a year or two ago. So far, the furthest transmission I've knowingly received was a station in Chicago while I was in NW Connecticut. I've also heard of people in the NE US receiving transmissions from Central America and Europe, especially at night (the sun causes some amount of interference).
You may protest that you can FM at 1 Mhz and get the range boost on a much nicer sounding signal but:
- FM isnt as efficient as AM and 1 Mhz isnt a lot of space
- FM "locks in" to a station, partially what makes it sound so good. On AM you hear everything and its "up to you" to figure it out; meaning the intended signal is there and you might be able to squeeze meaning out of it (since you know a lot about it). On FM if the receiver cant "lock in" or locks into another station you cant receive any information.
That last point is also why morse code is so reliable - a human operator can very easily distinguish a sine in noise
In the event of needing to communicate in an emergency you must assume that the right ionospheric conditions will not be present and that you are limited to line of sight.
In other words: you really don't need the ability to sometimes unreliably broadcast icy road conditions, or a tornado alert, to someone three states away.
I can't imagine choosing between two cars and picking one because of its AM radio reception. I wouldn't even make a bet that I know if my car can receive AM.
Between the standard AM radio content and the availability of better options like streamed audio, I just don’t see people caring.
Until and unless an emergency does happen, in which case, they’d have to actively know to tune in (unlikely) and have to not want to pull over to listen.
They’d also have to be in a situation where the other emergency broadcast tools on their phones don’t work.
I just don’t see it being anything that any number of consumers would care about, beyond the standard number of outliers that are usually accounted for.
I think the latter is significantly more likely.