Congress fights to keep AM radio in cars | Hacker News Reader

Congress fights to keep AM radio in cars

niemanlab.org

There arent any alternatives for major catastrophes that can top amplitude modulated radio.

if you are in a car fleeing for your life from a wildfire, major storm, or war, AM radio is available sometimes hundreds of miles from your location to provide timely instruction and lifesaving updates. if you need electricity for a radio, your car has fuel and can provide a radio signal to you for quite some time.

AM radio can be transmitted with a roll of wire and a relatively simple transciever from an FOB or refugee camp. digital radio requires codecs, licenses, and specialty equipment. Satellite radio may, or may not be available as the ground stations that power it require even more advanced transcievers and software to operate and could take months to repair if attacked or destroyed. Cellular towers require special beamforming antenna that can take months to rebuild or procure in an emergency and rely on an advanced system of transcievers and software to provide a signal.

its not Dolby quality, but if you need clean water and shelter it will guide you. Arguably you could mandate a VHF receiver in every car for FM based NOAA/EAS alerts, but AM is still cheaper.

I had read in a previous thread that some cars had been dropping it as the modern electronics in cars were generating too much interference for AM radio to work.

I heard it was the EV vehicles drive systems, not the modern electronics. Either way, they should fix the shielding if it's really that noisy.

And that's probably the gist of it, manufacturer find it cheaper to get rid of a legacy piece of infrastructure than "fixing the shielding" (and also support the vehicle that are already out there).

The funny thing is, some EVs like the Prius had AM radios all along. It seems like some manufacturers might be taking short cuts. I guess maybe interference regulations aren't strict enough to force the shielding issue.

A prius has an electric drive unit that is about 1/4 the power of a full EV. It also is only really used for getting the car off from stops.

Great analysis. This must be the crux of it, meaning the engineering tradeoff between good EMI mitigation and lower cost. Shielding is one way to go. I do not know the details here for cars, but in digital systems people tend to use spread spectrum clocking (SSC) to lessen the interference. Others on the thread seem to suggest the culprit is not the electronics, though, so that technique probably is not applicable.

Spark plugs triggered by an ignition coil and a distributor (AKA what cars were doing 100 years ago) is an arrangement that logically should produce so much interference, I struggle to think how modern electronics can top it.

While that’s all true, why is being in a car a special case? If I’m at home without power, I can’t access online information sources any more than I could if I were driving somewhere without cell data coverage. Should building codes require my house to have a radio installed? No one is legislating that tents have built in radios, but if I’m camping I’m in even more need of emergency information than if I’m already in a car and driving. Someone might rightfully tell me that it’s my responsibility to take a radio with me while I’m camping. Why does Toyota have to provide me with a radio while driving?

I ham a ham extra license. I like radio and see its value. I think it would be more appropriate to tell people to pack an AM radio in the disaster bag we’re all suppose to keep in the trunk.

> If I’m at home without power...

You can use a crystal radio for that case [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_radio

While you're not wrong that a crystal radio does work without power, you do actually need to have a crystal radio in order to use one.

There are probably more homes with a charged USB power bank that could power an FM or DAB radio than homes with a crystal radio or the means to build one.

Yes, it is not generally available but as an anecdote I mentioned crystal radios because I don't know that from my technical school or university degrees but thanks to my grandfather who didn't go to an university.

I’d personally use one of the ham radios charging on my bookshelf. If I were to ask my wife to pause while I whipped up a crystal radio, I’d likely be the first casualty of the disaster.

Most people don’t have those bags.

We mandate seat belts in cars when they could be aftermarket, too.

Yes, for exactly the same argument. It seems like you understand the point?

(In practice, I like any car I ride to have seat belts. But I support the argument that since there's no externalities from other people not using seatbelts, we shouldn't force them to have some. And in any case, the orthodox way to deal with externalities is via a tax, not via a ban.)

> But I support the argument that since there's no externalities from other people not using seatbelts, we shouldn't force them to have some

That argument is wrong. There are absolutely externalities to allowing other people's car rides to be less safe for them, even if no one else is injured or killed because of it.

Every injury or death makes health care more expensive for everyone, even in a place like the US that don't have socialized health care. The costs of these emergencies are largely borne by health and car insurance companies, and those costs mean everyone's premiums are going to be just a little bit higher.

Also consider the effects on family (or friends) when someone dies (or is much more severely injured) because they weren't wearing seat belts. Maybe the breadwinning spouse dies or becomes disabled, and now the remaining family has to go on welfare. Maybe it was a single parent who died, and the kids end up in the foster system. In the disability case, insurance (which might be Medicare) companies will have to pay for rehabilitation and possibly care for the rest of the person's life. Hell, just the emotional anguish of a loved one dying in a situation where it was easily preventable is an externality worth trying to eliminate.

> Every injury or death makes health care more expensive for everyone, even in a place like the US that don't have socialized health care. The costs of these emergencies are largely borne by health and car insurance companies, and those costs mean everyone's premiums are going to be just a little bit higher.

Insurance is a bet between you and the insurance company. If you decide to engage in extra risky behaviour, then a competent insurance company will charge you extra. (Or rather, more PR friendly but equivalent: your insurance company will offer you a discount, if you can prove that you are exercising, don't smoke and always wear a seatbelt, etc.)

Realised average accident rates for certain parts of the population can help you fine tune your risk models, but they aren't mathematically required.

That's why insurance companies can profitably insure one-off events just fine. Eg have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prize_indemnity_insurance for example where you can get bespoke insurance for your one-off novelty promotion. Golf course A making their golf holes wider won't affect the hole-in-one insurance premium that Golf course B has to pay.

Of course, that's all unless there's some regulation that forces insurance companies to set premiums a certain way. But then, blame that price control regulation.

An insurance company that prices risks accurately will outcompete an insurance company that solely relies on population averages. The latter will overcharge less risky people who drive with a seatbelt on (so they will move to the competition), and will undercharge risky people without seatbelts, and thus lose money on them.

> Also consider the effects on family (or friends) when someone dies (or is much more severely injured) because they weren't wearing seat belts. Maybe the breadwinning spouse dies or becomes disabled, and now the remaining family has to go on welfare. Maybe it was a single parent who died, and the kids end up in the foster system. In the disability case, insurance (which might be Medicare) companies will have to pay for rehabilitation and possibly care for the rest of the person's life. Hell, just the emotional anguish of a loved one dying in a situation where it was easily preventable is an externality worth trying to eliminate.

You are proving too much here. Yes, this argument could apply to driving without a seat belt. But it could apply just as much to any driving at all. Or to lazing on the couch instead of exercising, or to living in the New Mexico instead of Maine, or to drinking or smoking, or working as a lumberjack.

---

Just to be clear, on the object level I'm ok with smoking bans (instead of just high taxes) and laws requiring seatbelts. But that's just because they are convenient for me. They aren't properly justified.

> An insurance company that prices risks accurately will outcompete an insurance company that solely relies on population averages. The latter will overcharge less risky people who drive with a seatbelt on (so they will move to the competition), and will undercharge risky people without seatbelts, and thus lose money on them.

Only if the price of costing risk accurately is less than just using population averages. So they look at cheap ways to cost risk, like credit scores and driving records.

Just give people a check-box to indicate whether they use a seatbelt. (And use the rest of the contract to create legal consequences for lying.)

That's a risibly untenable idea for several reasons.

For one, the company presumably finds out you were lying when you got hurt or died. So you -- the person who made the contract -- are not the one who gets punished for lying.

Instead, it's your family who's punished, because they don't get the monetary support after you die or to help take care of you, and likewise society is, because if you're still alive you're likely bankrupt and therefore fall into social support systems.

Second, putting something in a contract doesn't make it magically happen. If the company wanted to recoup anything for you lying, they'd have to take you or your estate to court. That's both extremely expensive for everyone involved and also overtaxes the courts, an already overtaxed public resource.

The damage to individual freedom is negligible (the right to die by windshield strike is not well-recognized) and the damage to innocent parties and society is much higher.

I don't see how you can say it's not well supported with a straight face.

> For one, the company presumably finds out you were lying when you got hurt or died. So you -- the person who made the contract -- are not the one who gets punished for lying.

> Instead, it's your family who's punished, because they don't get the monetary support after you die or to help take care of you, and likewise society is, because if you're still alive you're likely bankrupt and therefore fall into social support systems.

Huh, that's exactly the same situation as lying to your life insurance, eg about prior conditions or whatnot. And they handle that just fine.

> Second, putting something in a contract doesn't make it magically happen. If the company wanted to recoup anything for you lying, they'd have to take you or your estate to court.

They'll just don't pay out. No need to recoup anything.

> The damage to individual freedom is negligible (the right to die by windshield strike is not well-recognized) and the damage to innocent parties and society is much higher.

There's no damage to third parties. The damage is approximately all to the guy who's dumb enough to not wear his seat belt.

Every person who puts themselves at risk in the military, fire department or other rescue type situation does so because life/death outcomes of other people are not considered neutral events.

All our lives are interconnected and interdependent. Most untimely deaths will leave a financial, practical and mental health crater in many lives around them. When children are involved the fallout can last generations. Not to mention the lost investment of parents, the education system, etc.

That would be a good argument for not allowing people to make any independent decisions at all.

Compare and contrast https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/bad-definitions-of-democrac...

> That's a good argument for not allowing people to make any independent decisions at all.

No it isn't. Very false dichotomy.

The benefits of doing something have to be balanced against its costs. People's longevity and freedom both matter.

And something impossible can't have valid arguments for it. No independent decisions is an unattainable scenario even for maximalist autocracies.

What, that I actually said, do you disagree with?

> No independent decisions is a completely unattainable scenario even for maximalist autocrats.

Sure, but you could still try to minimise independent decisions as much as possible.

Have a look at the article I linked for a more eloquent argument.

Except nobody is actually trying to do that, so the argument is irrelevant.

This is wrong. If you don’t wear a seatbelt and you get into an accident, your whole body becomes a projectile. One persons dumb choice to not wear a seatbelt can have potentially fatal consequences to others riding in the car who are not responsible for that decision.

The energy has to go somewhere. So if you are not wearing a seatbelt and the car flings you out like a projectile, the car itself will have slightly less kinetic energy, being slightly less dangerous.

In any case, even if you discount energy conservation, the extra danger to other people from you becoming a projectile is likely tiny. You can run some cost benefit analyses, and I'm pretty sure you'll come to the conclusion that a Pigouvian tax of something like a dollar a year is enough to offset this.

> One persons dumb choice to not wear a seatbelt can have potentially fatal consequences to others riding in the car who are not responsible for that decision.

Are you talking about people in the same car as the guy not wearing a seatbelt? Then you can exactly identify the other parties, so the transaction costs for Coasean bargaining are very low. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem Basically, if you think it's dangerous to ride along with people who don't wear a seatbelt, then don't ride along with people who don't wear a seatbelt.

As a pedestrian you can't opt out of what drivers are doing. That's a real exernality. But as a fellow passenger, you know exactly who else is in the car, and you can refuse to ride with them.

If I understand your suggestion right, it's like marrying someone with bad breath, and then asking the government to make a law to make your spouse brush their teeth?

> the car itself will have slightly less kinetic energy, being slightly less dangerous.

Extremely slightly less. What, 170lbs compared to 4,000lbs+? Is 4% weight reduction after the collision starts, minus the energy imparted to the seats and other passengers and the windshield and what not, really going to make much impact to the overall collision calculus here?

Yes, this won't have much of an impact. But neither is there much of an _additional_ danger to other people from you flying around in an accident.

There is, because people can and do go through glass. Sure, most of the time this means that their brains are just spread on the highway like nutella. But they could also go through YOUR windshield.

Not everyone riding as a passenger in a car has choice in these situations, namely children.

People are already allowed to eg feed their children unhealthy food etc. That's usually not classified as an externality.

Putting yourself and a child in a flying mechanical deathtrap and you're not wearing is an unnecessary risk to their life in the same way that leaving guns loaded and unlocked in a house is. These are differences in the magnitude of risk and a large enough difference in magnitude becomes a difference in kind.

That's mostly an argument for the law requiring children to be buckled in at most, perhaps.

I'm trying to read your comments charitably and made in good faith but I'll admit it is proving to be a challenge here.

In the UK they ran a campaign to raise awareness that during an accident a passenger riding in the back can injure the passenger in front if they don't wear a seatbelt. That seems like a serious externality to me. I don't know if you just hate seatbelts or love arguing but there are absolutely reasons that people should wear seatbelts and I'm glad most people have accepted that the inconvenience of wearing them is pretty negligible now.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mKHY69AFstE&pp=ygUeVWsgc2VhdGJ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/YouShouldKnow/comments/359am5/ysk_i...

It's not an externality if it's in the same car.

If you are a driver, and you want people in the back to wear a seatbelt, just ask them to wear a seatbelt. Duh.

> I don't know if you just hate seatbelts [...]

Why would I hate seatbelts? I wear them all the time, whenever I have to take a car. I just don't buy the usual justification for forcing other people to wear seatbelts (or have AM radios..)

> [...] and I'm glad most people have accepted that the inconvenience of wearing them is pretty negligible now.

I'm all for people wearing seatbelts, too. Just like I'm in favour of people eating their vegetables and flossing their teeth. Voluntarily.

Huge externality for not using seat belts. When your dead body closes the highway for several hours while they scoop up your carcass and do the required investigations. Road fatalities always take longer for first responders than simply injuries.

You can cost it out, and charge people an extra 5 dollars (or whatever the figure ends up being) in annual taxes for that externality.

I think it's more like a radio in a plane. You sometimes have travel advisories and signs telling you to tune to an AM frequency when flashing. A radio in the trunk doesn't do you any good and could lead to a real mess if everyone had to pull over to use it. If you're already putting FM radios and stuff in the car, it shouldn't be a problem to put an AM radio in. If interference is an issue, then they should be working to clean that up with better shielding.

And the intended purpose is emergency use. It doesn't matter if the audio isn't spectacular, all that matters is that a human voice be understood.

And note that AM is much more forgiving of terrain than FM. You can still be shadowed but the lower the frequency the less likely you are to be shadowed from the transmitter.

Cars radios are battery powered so will continue to work during power outages, and large enough that adding an AM radio + antenna is not really an issue - unlike a mobile phone. Seems like a good way to ensure most of the population has access to emergency broadcasts.

Edit clarified car radios are battery powered

I'd bet good money that many phones have an FM radio tuner that isn't usable only because they follow one misguided company and won't make a headphone jack available.

Recently I was surprised by not-finding any phone-accessories that are basically a USB-C plug, a little blister of inline electronics, and then more wire for an AM/FM antenna. (And an app to control the tuning/presets, etc.)

It seems like something that ought to be technically doable, but perhaps the market isn't there compared to just selling standalone little radio-things?

I'd expect so. It's basically like an analog TV capture card for your computer— but the use cases are even more limited as it's hard to imagine your phone being the platform on which you'd want to record stuff off the air.

I guess it could make sense if the phone is driving your wireless earbuds or you want to change stations using Siri, but yeah other than that, I dunno.

Seems like the market would be people without unlimited internet. Audio takes up a fair bit of bandwidth over time so being able to listen to your personal music or the radio in your earbuds might be considered useful.

USB-C permits analog audio passthrough so you could literally use a passive headphone adapter for the antenna but it's a feature rarely supported anywhere.

Not anymore, that mode has been deprecated since USB C 2.3 (released last year). Almost nobody actually supported it in reality though.

It’s not exactly what you mean, but a nano RTLSDR, a usb C adapter, and any SDR app can do what you’re outlining and far more.

Schrödinger’s Apple. They’re simultaneously behind Android manufacturers for not following their stead, and to blame for anything negative Android manufacturers do as well.

Why can’t the Android manufacturers just be accountable by themselves?

Android manufacturers weren't on stage touting their courage.

Otherwise if that's the drum you want to beat, android makers were the first to push bigger and bigger screens ("phablets") and opened the door for Apple to also inflate it's devices, to the point where 6" is considered "small" by today's standard.

Youve completely and unsurprisingly missed the point.

It’s irrelevant to Android phones whether Apple made the choice first or how they did it. Android manufacturers are able to be accountable for their own decisions.

it’s even more irrelevant that Android phones had larger screens first, unless people on the Apple side are blaming Android manufacturers for the push to larger screens.

> it’s even more irrelevant that Android phones had larger screens first, unless people on the Apple side are blaming Android manufacturers for the push to larger screens.

I would be that person, but the iPhone mini showed the market just isn't there for it :(

If we look at the Pixel 4a which was a 5"8 screen, straight in the middle of the mini (5"4) and the regular iPhone (6"1). It had extremly good sales, and of course the super low price is a major factor in it, but it also was very well reviewed and people flocked to it as one of the best smallish phone at the time.

Then of course Google just went bigger for their garbage 5G variant of it which just trashed battery life, and all subsequent phones doing ML with the Tensor processor also went bigger.

It makes me think it's not a matter of commercial success, or even if there's a market for it. The issue is probably the massive incentives on the maker side to push a bigger battery to deal with more computation and push the device price upper to get better margins.

We can keep each maker accountable for their own decisions, while blaming the company pushing the Overton window on what the customer will accept as regressions.

I don't see how the two are exclusive.

They’re not exclusive but that’s also not what you or the person I initially responded to were doing, now was it? If we’re actually looking at both of your responses and not a retroactive framing of them. Neither one of your comments did anything but levy shots at Apple, and neither even mentioned the Android manufacturers part in it.

In fact your own reply starts of with blaming solely Apple. Your only mention of Android is how they did bigger screens first.

> In fact your own reply starts of with blaming solely Apple. Your only mention of Android is how they did bigger screens first.

This sub-thread started about Apple, addressing it first feels logical to me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41762229

My other response was enterely focused on Google: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4177226

I had a phone in 2010 that would receive FM / AM iirc if I had headphones plugged in, used the wire. I think it was a Motorola phone.

Probably the original Droid, I had the same one

several of their current ones also have this feature

My Moto g play (2021) has an FM radio app. And, I believe that my KaiOS feature phones had it too.

The story goes that analog radio receivers are built-in to nearly every smartphone, but most lack the app or drivers to access them.

I remember a few of my old Android phones did have FM radio capabilities, and if you downloaded a tuner app you could actually listen in to them

I can't remove the tuner app from any of my phones actually :)

According to a post below, you would lose the bet. Reddit also claims that several phones have supported FM antenna passthrough via USB-C.

I imagine adding analog FM radio isn't a major selling point on a phone where you can already stream the digital feeds from most FM stations – not to mention Spotify, Youtube, Apple Music, etc.

> you can already stream the digital feeds from most FM stations

That will use up your data.

By contrast FM radio is free, and we have some bloody good BBC radio stations in blighty.

Reminds me of being in 6th form and listening to Radio 1 on my iPod. Those used to support FM just fine!

Oh, the legendary iPod radio remote!

https://ipodwiki.com/wiki/IPod_Radio_Remote

Shows Apple can do FM if they put their mind to it.

RIP iPod Classic (2007-2014).

> That will use up your data.

Where do you live that you're worried about data? Is this an American thing?

I've lived in Asia and Europe and data is so cheap and plentiful that I'm never changing my behaviour to save a few MBs.

Or are you not worried about data but you're trying hard to make a case for this FM antenna that no one wants in their phones?

Nevermind your data. During natural disasters, as was the case in North Carolina, everyone loses cell coverage.

They said they lived in the UK

nice to see that you have no problem seeing things from another person's POV

Nice to see that you can make a glib, worthless, condescending comment that added nothing to the conversation.

At least start your sentences with a capital letter, they might at least have the veneer of being worthwhile to read.

it was worth responding to i guess

The problem in the US is price gouging and ISPs accepting government money to improve infrastructure then pocketing it instead.

My understanding in America is that FM is full of pirate transmissions blocking real channels and thus reducing usefulness of FM for the majority.

American culture leans “against the feds”, it really is wackamole trying to shut them down, on the other hand it drives more subscriptions to satelite radio which is good for the gdp, so win win.

Hell I believe this is even the case in London, just not as extreme.

I live in the US and can't recall ever having come across a pirate station. Sometimes people have little FM transmitters in their cars to get audio to their car stereos, but those have a range of meters.

I love your vision of America, and want to live there.

My thoughts exactly. Sad.

Man, you give us too much credit :p

Not as many pirate radio stations as they’re used to be in the 80s and 90s. A few friends were running them from unsecured buildings back in the day. It’s where I first tuned into a younger DJ Khaled, LOL. The FCC started cracking down heavily by the 00s. And they were eventually replaced by community radio stations. Properly licensed, tend to have more religious, and marketed towards immigrant communities who don’t follow western, English speaking news.

Those pirate radio stations are still out there just with a low power license and a sheen of legitimacy now.

Pirate radio stations are extremely rare in the US. They exist sure but, not so much that it's making the FM band not useful. The FCC really doesn't fuck around.

More like Clear Channel / iHeartMedia bought all of them and turned them into the “the greatest hits of the 80s, 90s, and today!” I listen to NPR sometimes, and KEXP plays good music, and I can also stream both of them. I haven’t listened to commercial FM radio in many years because it’s absolutely awful in the US.

I’m the one who said it’s weird we single out cars to have AM radios, but my wife actually listens to live sports on AM during her work commute. If I had to pick exactly one of FM or AM to have in our car, it’d be AM without a second thought.

> By contrast FM radio is free, and we have some bloody good BBC radio stations in blighty

Unfortunately my antenna can't pick up the FM signal, and iPlayer is geo-blocked, but... I do seem to be able to stream some BBC radio stations and program[me]s via the magic of the internets.

One good reason to use FM instead of the internet is that it scales better - you can have practically infinte receivers, wheras most digital radio on the internet will deliver the same content for each listener individually, thus using more bandwidth per listener.

5G has a broadcast option, but I’m not sure if that’s supported by any commercially available phone yet.

Apart from some old 3G tech demos with TV streaming, none of the user data multi/broad cast functionality from 3GPP cellphone standards reached a usable state in consumer hardware, with the single obvious exception being cell broadcast (basically broadcast SMS, by my understanding).

I’m also very doubtful, but at least in Austria it’s being touted as a potential DAB alternative.

(That might just be a strategic device by the incumbent public transmitter operator though – they have ubiquitous FM coverage, which helps avoid competing programs on DAB out by decreasing the utility of buying a DAB receiver.)

5g having broadcast is closer to FM rather than the internet. Broadcast does not work on the internet.

RTP and multicast though...

Over the internet?

True. Though technically multicast could be used, which helps somewhat.

On the other hand, everyone can get their own personal "radio station" via streaming...

I've read that most phones have a built-in FM tuner, but it's disabled for the US market because telcos wanted you to buy music from their store.

It was true at one point - I owned at least one phone with a disabled FM radio.

Some cursory checks on my current phone suggest it's got one (just doesn't work for some reason with FM Tuner apps).

They usually require headphones plugged into 3.5mm jack...

yep, the headphone cable acts as the antenna!

The tuner app says the radio is not present. I am on LineageOS so there is many possible reasons for it not working.

But, there are folks complaining about how Samsung broke FM tuners with an update on this phone a few years back. Who knows what that is about.

My current mobile phone has an FM radio, works well.

An AM radio doesn't even need a battery, I built a crystal set as a child.

This exactly. With a little screwing around, you don’t even need a “crystal”, just a corroded piece of metal, lead corroded by sulphuric acid works well. Aside from that, you can make an earphone out of some fine wire and a small magnetic fragment, and a suitable capacitor using aluminium foil and paper or plastic film. That’s it. 3 components and some wire. Not even a battery is needed for relatively powerful AM broadcast signals. If you want to get fancy you can wrap some wire around a paper towel tube for a tuning resonator.

Or, you can just use the old wood stove in my childhood home. We had some wire racks for drying gloves and mittens supported above it, and the whole contraption played the 670khz radio station broadcasting about 15 miles away, sometimes at an annoying level of volume. You could quiet it down with some wet gloves, though.

It also would shock you when it was being loud. Somehow, the demodulated signal ended up at a pretty high voltage. I’ve often tried to imagine the circuit that was going on there between the stove, grounded at the bottom and with a 30 foot high metal chimney, the aluminium foil backed insulation in the house, the two metal pipe penetrations connected to the huge foil planes 9 feet apart on the first and second stories, the gasketed top of the stove that was somewhat insulated from the grounded base, and attached to the chimney at the top, and the corroded bolts that held the bottom to the top.

Regulations (ignoring riders, graft, and other political inefficiencies) are made with consideration for relative costs, compliance, ease of enforcement, ...

Forcing manufacturers to keep an AM antenna hooked up to the infotainment they're already including is pretty cheap, easy to enforce, and will have high compliance. Moreso because they already have the engineering expertise for doing so.

It also forces at least one AM radio into the hands of >90% American households, and since for most disasters there's some kind of an evacuation you'll likely be in your car rather than your home.

Could we draw a line in the sand somewhere else (e.g., building codes)? Sure. It'll be a higher cost solution that grandfathers in most homes as not having an AM radio though. Could we mandate disaster bags? It'll probably devolve into a cottage industry of the cheapest thing that's maybe legal with low compliance of households even buying something to that standard, but sure, we can do that too. A "greedy" (as in greedy algorithms) utilitarian perspective might be valuable here though. Instead of bikeshedding, does this bill help make people safer at an appropriate cost? If so, pointing to other lines in the sand is reasonable insofar as we want to make the law better, but not to refute the law in the first place. If not, we ought to be able to point to those reasons instead of other lines in the sand.

> while I’m camping

If >1/3 of Americans lived in tents every day and >90% of them were in tents every year, then you can bet they'd have more such regulations around tent living, yes.

This is the result of conservative/Right leaning interests lobbying Congress for years, because a substantial amount of AM radio programming in metro areas is conservative talk and religious programming. The connection to car audio systems is likely because drivetime is where stations and shows make their money. To polish the point to a blinding glare: this is freedom loving/rule hating American conservatives leveraging the government to force businesses to incur expenses because politics and feelings

>why is being in a car a special case?

Because this is about America, a large and sprawling country where most residents can be safely assumed to own a car and would use it in the event of an emergency or disaster.

Obviously if you have the foresight to have a (AM!) radio in your home and your camping gear that's even better.

Part of the point is compliance. If we were to decide that all homes must have an AM radio, you're not going to get great compliance. I would likely put off buying one because it doesn't feel necessary "right now", and I'm sure if there was a requirement for builders to actually build the radio into the home, old homes (read: nearly every single current home) wouldn't be required to have a retrofit.

> I think it would be more appropriate to tell people to pack an AM radio in the disaster bag we’re all suppose to keep in the trunk.

I don't have a disaster bag in my trunk, and I know exactly two people who do (they are volunteer SAR people, so big surprise there). You'll get very little compliance for this requirement. And if you want to try to enforce compliance, doing so will be incredibly expensive.

And that brings us to the other part: cost. Every (or nearly ever) car out there in the US today already has an AM radio, from my 2-year-old car to some restored antique from the 1960s. Most people don't have a standalone AM(/FM) radio these days, and basically no one has one built into their home. Can you imagine how expensive it would be to require all homes in the US be retrofitted with a built-in AM radio? Even requiring homeowners to purchase a standalone AM radio would be massively expensive. Especially when compared to the cost of $0 to require that all cars have them in it... because they already do! And for car makers planning to drop the AM radios: it will be at most a few tens of dollars added to their cost to continue to include them. A cost they can continue to pass on to their customers.

> I don't have a disaster bag in my trunk, and I know exactly two people who do (they are volunteer SAR people, so big surprise there). You'll get very little compliance for this requirement. And if you want to try to enforce compliance, doing so will be incredibly expensive.

In Germany, the inspector would fail you pretty quickly. Consequently compliance is very high, and somehow not very expensive.

You mean you have such a requirement in Germany? I'm intrigued. Tell me more please.

Or where you talking about what would happen if such a mandate existed?

https://www.ramstein.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/293...

It's a first aid kit, as well as accident signaling cones and reflective vest.

They could easily update it with a simple AM transceiver if AM radios in cars become uncommon.

Maybe you mean first-aid kit, which is compulsory in probably all Europe countries? I assume disaster bag is larger survival kit, with some water, dry food, flashlight, etc.

> which is compulsory in probably all Europe countries?

Nope, here in Italy at least it's not compulsory.

Well in Serbia first aid kit is not only compulsory, but has expiration date (!) which is checked on annual car inspection.

where I live, if I kept a disaster bag in my car my window would be broken and it would be stolen

it's not necessary to keep it in your car. the point is to keep it in a bag, which you could quickly bring to your car or even carry with you.

> While that’s all true, why is being in a car a special case?

If you are in an emergency that requires evacuation, and you have means to evacuate, there's a good chance that means will be a car. In such an evacuation, having a universal way to communicate would be pretty useful. Although, it's not clear that people would know to listen to it.

Also, plenty of existing travel advisory systems rely on AM radio, so it's a mess if a new generation of cars can't tune to AM 530 when lights flash. The vast majority of existing cars in the US have an AM radio receiver, and there's a generation of classic cars that never upgraded to FM radio.

Many cellphones could receive AM and FM radio through the 3.5mm headphone jack, before it was eliminated from most devices. It was possible, but people just never talked about it. You can't even find search results because the idea is so alien to most people in search engines.

Example: https://xdaforums.com/t/diy-fm-antenna-with-3-5mm-audio-jack...

If only we had legislation to bring those back...

AM radio reception on a headphone wire is pretty bad. I've had a few small radios designed to get commercial AM/FM using the headphones as antennas; the reception is almost always very miserable.

Meanwhile commercial FM is like ~3.5M wavelength; you're pretty close to a quarter wave with a normal headphone wire (~3ft).

>you're pretty close to a quarter wave with a normal headphone wire (~3ft)

You mean half-wave, right?

3.5 m is almost 12 feet, so 3 feet is almost a quarter wave.

Ah, my bad, didn't convert feet properly in my head. Not used to it.

I'll take half the blame for using such measures interchangeably in a single sentence.

The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it!

Can we still have AM radio via usb c?

Because people use their cars to escape disasters and being able to provide information like "I5 is deadlocked for miles, find an alternate route if you are fleeing from $catastrophe" is critical.

I assume you’ve never driven across the middle of the US? Basically every state has emergency broadcast channels for significant snowstorms. Without AM radio, you’d pretty much be screwed.

Sitting in your house you have all sorts of options that aren’t available when you’re 30+ miles from the nearest town without any significant supplies on hand in your car.

Terrible assumption; I’ve driven all over the place. It just strikes me as odd that feds want to say a car must have AM and it’s not the driver’s responsibility to provide one themselves.

I’m not far from places where you’re legally required to use tire chains in bad weather. You have to provide your own.

Would it be also odd if feds said that a house must have a smoke alarm during its sale? Both of these items you probably wish to never be thankful to.

Also, in grand scheme of things, AM tuner is probably a fraction of a dollar. Optimizing it out is weird.

Because it's Yet Another Step in the wrong direction, and will be used as justification down the line to get rid of AM/Radio/Analog Radio a bit more or entirely. Keeping it around, or in a car, may be the wrong or inefficient way of solving the problem of comms in an emergency. But it does mean that we "force" the lingering of the tech in some way, so as to not let it be dismantled in the relentless march of whatever is causing these kinds of things to disappear.

It's a quirk or random fact of history that they got put into cars but not houses, but that doesn't mean we should get rid of it. It's smart and reasoning people like you and me that look at this and think "ugh, no need to have it in a car, we can have it in a bug out bag and it'll make cars cheaper, etc". But that kind of thinking is wrong for society past a certain point.

Before we know it, we'll own nothing, we'll rely on Daddy Government for everything, and we'll be happy! Maybe they'll let us own a Digital Government-Issued Codec-Infused Satellite Radio®, so they can reach us at all times.

I really don't think mandate to include a -- let's be generous -- $1 AM radio in a car in case of emergencies will lead to communism.

These people act as those cost analysis doesn't exist. It costs close to nothing to provide a radio, but the benefits can be huge.

Our government should step in when it makes sense. We determine if it makes sense via cost analysis and risk analysis. This is why the communism slippery slope argument doesn't work.

For example, banning public smoking along with other measures have saved millions of lives in the long run. Of course smoking is a personal choice, but it's also addictive and dangerous. It is sometimes beneficial to override people's "personal choice" if the benefit is big enough and the cost low enough. Ultimately, pretty much everyone is now grateful public smoking is gone.

My intention was not to say that including the radio is going to lead to communism? I'm actually advocating for us to keep the radio in.

In the eastern block cable radio[0] was used explicitly like this - even though it normally worked as a normal radio, but as the receivers were powered by the cable & the system presumably had battery backup, it could be used in an emergency/apocalypse scenario.

And it also had the added benefit of being easier to control, as the receivers could not be used to listen to western radio like regular radio receivers.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_radio

> why is being in a car a special case?

Cars are expensive to modify if possible at all. My recent make Audi and Porsches, aside from being completely unreliable, have no ability to have a third party head unit due to module coding lock in. Gone are the days of slapping a double din head unit where the LCD and AC controls went and wiring up to the CAN bus and analog audio cables.

However, it’s cheap to add in/enable a feature on a chip that’s already installed.

Similarly at home there’s probably already an AM radio somewhere even if you don’t think you have it. My home theater system has an AM radio. I have a clock radio somewhere. An older phone does AM radio. And unlike a car, an AM/FM radio is a $20-50 expense.

> While that’s all true, why is being in a car a special case?

This is about US policies. The US has a high dependence on cars so it makes sense that it is being singled out

And cars are used for evacuations. Where communications is important.

Really, if you are isolating in your house, and loose power. What are you doing? A lot of people would need to go out and sit in the car with the AM radio to get any information.

I suppose to make it fair, every house should also be required to have an AM radio.

Maybe just to prevent digital lock in.

I'd hate to be in an Emergency, and suddenly I can't get any information because all I have are digital devices, An app on the phone, and the app was discontinued, or no longer supported.

This will be interesting as young people don't listen to the radio as much as they used to.

So you probably want to enforce a check on having am radio and that it actually works because young folk won't notice it not working as they won't be using it. This means that the enforcement will likely fall at least partially on the car owner. I wonder how younger folk, who have less financially stability and are not as interested in the radios as the previous gen, will react to this potentially new requirement.

This being the US, I would expect the kind of people that argue against socialised healthcare to also argue against on the basis that each person should be capable of purchasing a $10 am radio receiver and keeping it with themselves, their emergency bag or their car for emergencies without needing the state to play nanny

Maybe just make it part of the car inspection. The car already has to have things like headlights and wiper blades checked to be working to get a license.

That sounds like the most likely direction. I would imagine the price will of the inspection will increase slightly to account for that but adding it to the inspection makes the most sense

This is obviously a US thing. Here in Europe, it isn't necessarily so because you can walk anywhere. During the last evacuations in my region, virtually no one evacuated by car and radio wasn't needed. But it makes sense that if you live in car-centric areas, you would need a car and ways to communicate across vast distances

There's lots of handheld emergency radios that work with AM. They've usually got added doodads like built in lights and strobe patterns and maybe a flint and steel striker or something.

Nothing about this is car specific except it makes for a good example, and people like to whine anytime cars are mentioned.

>While that’s all true, why is being in a car a special case? If I’m at home without power...

We're talking about the USA here. Probably a higher fraction of Americans have a car than have a home!

Turn it around.

If where you are at, nobody has cars.

And you loose power. Does everyone just huddle at home with zero information while some tidal wave is coming at you?

If you say, well we keep a battery powered Radio handy at home. (and we are so prepared we replace the batteries every year)

Well, then that is the answer. Cars already have radios, so keep the AM option available.

I'd consider that ensuring that mobile phones have AM reception would be better as some people don't own a car. Consider the case when you have a music festival and thousands of people are camping away from their car if they have one - almost everyone would have a mobile phone either on them (especially if they're using it to buy drinks) or in their tents.

IIRC AM radio requires an antenna, and even the smallest type is thicker than a phone. Not that I'd complain about thicker phones at this point.

Older phones used to be able to play FM, requiring a headphone cable to be used as an antenna.

AM radio does require an antenna of some description, but usually the signal received through even a tiny bit of metal will be more than sufficient. The problem is usually dealing with locally produced noise (e.g. someone using a microwave or switching lights on and off) rather than trying to pick up a weak signal.

For the purpose of emergency broadcasts, maybe using both AM and FM would make sense.

In this era of SDR radio, I'd be surprised if cell phones don't already have the capability with just a firmware update. I suspect the main reason phones don't allow broadcast radio is to create demand for streaming services.

> While that’s all true, why is being in a car a special case?

Legislation is about cars specifically? Many already have AM radios. So it’s not about forcing motorcycles, houses, bus stops or bicycles to add radios just to keep the feature in the cars.

However that is not the only point of the proposal. It might be about the economics of running all the AM stations. So it’s a lobbying effort from that front. The emergency part just sounds more wholesome.

>I think it would be more appropriate to tell people to pack an AM radio in the disaster bag we’re all suppose to keep in the trunk.

From dealing with so-called "policy wonks" over the years, having a solution that requires people take action ahead of time and buy something new to replace something they had in the past is a non-starter. They most likely won't listen to anything after that. They are extremely risk-adverse in general so any change is seen as bad unless proven otherwise. It's easier (in their mind) to just force things to stay the way they are since they don't trust people to make decisions.

> having a solution that requires people take action ahead of time and buy something new to replace something they had in the past is a non-starter

Do we have studies that test this hypothesis? Did people actually fail to replace the old thing by the new, or did it turn out okay?

Yeah, how many bug out bags do you own? How many people do you know have one?

How many people would actually know to try the AM band in an emergency? How many people even still know how to turn their radio to an AM band? And know what station to listen to?

I think this number is waaaay smaller than anyone thinks. Especially with modern buttonless car systems.

Where I am in Mass, highways often have big billboards saying "Tune to 1610 AM for emergency info" or whatever.

This is common in mountains in WA too.

To replace the AM in cars isn’t just the cars - it’s all the signage and transmitters, for regional information.

And the pack-an-AM-radio approach is likely to fall victim to old batteries. Low probability emergency equipment people are likely to forget about.

And a common use case for this would be people evacuating a disaster area. Being able to put up a simple transmitter with localized instructions would be a very good thing. As it stands there are government transmitters out there running looped broadcasts with general information and closure information.

You can buy an emergency AM radio, fully integrated with a lithium battery, a hand crank, a tiny solar panel, a flashlight. It can also charge your phone.

Bought one, it lasted a few years of very light use, but I can’t replace the battery so it’s trash now. I don’t like having to own more things I can’t service. Especially when products tend to be non-durable.

Why a car should be a special case is that that is what people will hop into in an emergency. Great to have it with you in those circumstances.

Let's think about the implied argument behind "why is this is a special case?". It is one thing to see this argument is deployed in a sincere effort to seek the truth and/or some better form of governance. It is another thing when this argument is simply a convenient thing to say to get what one wants.

There is often a nice antidote to the "why is this a special case?" argument that consists of two questions:

1. "What is your alternative?", and

2. "Is this alternative going to solve the problem better than what I proposed?"

In other words, if you don't like the current special-casey-ness of this policy, what alternative will you support that we can _actually_ put into practice?

If the person/organization does not actually support some workable alternative that will solve the problem better, that is quite telling! It suggests that solving this particular issue is not really a priority for them. Some people really are pedantic in the sense that they care about some logical consistency criteria more than solving particular problems. When one sees this in an individual, one might suspect various forms of confusion, poor prioritization, and maybe even some mental pathologies. When one sees this in an organization, particularly one making a public "argument", one should probably suspect they are deploying whatever argument suits their purpose, which is often just to derail progress on something they don't like.

Of course the meta-issue here is far from simple. It would be better if laws were enacted at the right level of abstraction, using some semblance of reasonableness. I often groan at the patchwork of laws that we see here in the US. But don't forget that in a democracy, the will of the people is far from rational, and the political will is even more mercurial. Very often one is better off taking what you can get rather than waiting for something better that may never materialize.

P.S. I find these sorts of discussions are interesting (in a sense), because it is hard to say to what degree someone is trotting out whatever logic simply suits their purpose. I've found this applies both to established interesting making "arguments" in public as well as individuals of all ages trying to defend what they have already decided is the best course of action. (Both are tiresome, frankly -- a part of human nature that I find rather counterproductive -- a suboptimal strategy that we've landed on.)

interesting -> interests

People don't prepare, so either pressuring or mandating congress to keep AM a standard is necessary.

There is already mature roadway infrastructure that provides localized announcements via AM - tunnels, bridges, mountain passes, low-vis areas, flood prone passes, hurricane evacuation corrodors, etc. I would imagine the cost of pressuring automakers to keep AM pales in comparison to the cost of updating public emergency communication infra.

I'm also a ham but I'm also a person who sometimes forgets there's an air compressor beneath my trunk floor.

Car is something where a regulation can be done effectively. Saying "each household has to have one" is a lot harder to implement.

For cars there is a limited amount of manufacturers and imports can be checked, too. Also there are regular inspections for cars.

And then there is a big density of cars, thus even for people who don't own a car it's likely there is a vehicle not far.

Thus it is quite efficient place to regulate.

I have a windshield glass breaking tool and seat belt cutter in my car. It also has a flashlight and an AM/FM radio. It has two AA rechargeable batteries but also has a hand crank. I can remove the batteries and use the hand crank at a reasonable speed to power the radio. I actually used it 20 years ago during an ice storm when there was no power for 5 days. I was able to hear news reports about where power was on and drive to a relatives house because the cell network was overloaded.

I live in a hurricane area, and in my “emergency kit” i have a small am/fm radio that runs on 4 AA batteries, i did a mod and soldered a USB cable so it can be used with battery packs.

There is the stupid underlying assumption that most people have cars, which is not true in the city where I live (only half of households do).

I do have an emergency AM/FM/WB radio at home that I take on camping trips.

>And what if I'm Amish and don't want to use electricity?

So much the worse for being you.

Off the top of my head… cars are perfect, Independent, mobile, distributed, self contained radio platforms. Travellers in cars need timely, relevant information during large scale disasters. Travellers in cars are frequently in areas that are underserved by other communication systems.

Cars are already nearly universally equipped with sound systems that include 99 percent of the components to make a good AM radio, and the cost of adding this capability to existing designs can be less than a dollar plus the antenna.

While following popular guidelines for emergency preparedness is a great idea, this is an opportunity to create a public good and a means (listeners) to maintain the required infrastructure for a robust, improvisable, resilient, nation-scale emergency communication system that will be there regardless of the level of preparedness of the average, clueless individual.

> While that’s all true, why is being in a car a special case?

We’re talking about the USA. Cars are not special cases, they are the central case around which society is structured, at the expense of many other things.

And, don't miss crystal radios for AM [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_radio

Yes there are plenty of good reason for AM based emergency radio, but the fixation on cars is pretty odd. Plenty of scenarios where the car is not accessible, so should radios also be mandated in peoples homes?

Here is a free one for you Elon: Throw a small usb-chargeable AM radio in the glove compartment and just move on.

Isn't their problem that the car is a noisy interference emitter? They'd have to fix the shielding issues to let the radio work while driving.

Well apparently they’ve already solved this since AM radio in cars has been a thing for like 90 years.

The issue is with inverter based EV drive systems.

If you're fleeing a disaster in your EV you may soon end up on foot anyway. I'd hate to think what the grid demand would be if, say, New York or LA suddenly all headed to the hills in EVs simultaneously. Especially if that infrastructure is taking battle damage.

I guess you could say the same about fossil fuel cars and gas stations? I doubt that everyone keeps their tanks full at all times. And just imagine the amount of traffic on roads in such a situation, regardless of your preferred energy source. You'd be struggling to get anywhere at all, unless you're among the first few fleeing town.

If your gas or diesel engine is old enough you could build yourself a wood/coal gasifier[1] and get yourself down the road. With a fairly simple regulator engines can be made to run well enough on natural gas, propane, maybe acetylene? Diesels will burn just about any liquid hydrocarbon, at least for a time before they succumb to injector pump damage or excessive carbon buildup.

EDIT: sure would love to know why y'all're downvoting... Is anything I wrote incorrect? Speaking from experience having crossed the US more than once burning various waste oils I'm pretty sure everything I wrote above is correct and factually accurate..

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas_generator

Because its massively impractical to think the average person is going to get the notice "you've got anywhere from an hour to an afternoon to evacuate" and be ready to convert their vehicle to goal gas and have plenty of wood/coal to actually get through the evacuation.

Yes, this is impossible. If having a vehicle connotes survival such people will perish. My point was only to illustrate there are many ways to make a piston engine go brr and only one way to make an EV mobile.

But at the same time there are many many ways to make the stuff that makes that EV mobile. And you don't have to modify the car.

Not to mention that EVs outmileage every other type of engine in a traffic jam. Also, power is much easier to get compared to fuel (with maybe the exception of fuel for old diesels that will run on everything - but this depends on circumstance). This is really a bad dig at EVs.

> power is much easier to get compared to fuel

Only if your power grid is functioning, which I wouldn't expect to be the case in most major disaster situations. Otherwise you'll be stuck burning fuel in a generator to charge your car.

EDIT: the other great thing about liquid fuel is it doesn't weigh very much. Diesel is 7.1lb/gal so if your diesel car gets 32mpg (like mine does) you get 4.5mi/lb. With 1500lb on a trailer--let's say it only gets 20mpg or 2.8mi/lb towing--that's an extra 4200mi of range. That's enough to go from Boston to Anchorage without refueling. It's also a much more easily transferable energy source than electrons--all you need to do is pour liquid from one container into another. You don't need some fancy battery charger that needs stable power at such and such Volts, Watts, and Hz.. So, no, in a disaster or war situation I doubt the EVs will work at all.

When the grid wasn't functioning around me, pretty much every gas station didn't have working pumps. The extreme few which did heavily rationed fuel (I think only 4gal per customer?) and often ran out.

I have ~200gal of red diesel in a home heating oil tank for the shop that I could easily burn in my car, tractor (with PTO generator), or whatever. This is the versatility of liquid fuel--it's a fungible asset with a pretty good shelf life (basically infinite for diesel, with appropriate additives quite long for gasoline).

Another problem with going to the gas station is payment. No internet means no credit cards or whiz-bang apple wallet stuff.

> I have ~200gal of red diesel

> it's a fungible asset

Cool, let me put that in my gas-powered ICE car. Its so fungible.

And I mean practically every household has a 200gal tank of diesel in their apartment and suburban household. Only the oddballs wouldn't have it.

> tractor

Hmm, makes me think maybe most households aren't in the same situation here. Most households are going to be in the same situation if their car is an ICE versus an EV. Maybe ever so slightly better in the EV, because at least they're likely to already be charged to like 90% every night versus somewhere between nearly empty to full. In the end, if the grid stops working chances are they're going to have a hard time getting more gas until they get someplace where the grid is functioning.

> my gas-powered ICE car

That's a choice, definitely the more common one in the US, but not the only one. I've been driving diesel cars for my entire adult life--better part of a quarter century now.

Gasoline is by far the worst of the common fuels--diesel, gasoline, and propane. They make propane dinghy outboards for exactly this reason--carrying gasoline just for the dinghy really inconveniences a boat whereas they already have propane and diesel onboard for the engine and galley. Diesel and propane both have ~infinite shelf life.

> Hmm, makes me think maybe most households aren't in the same situation here.

Yes, I've prioritized access to nature and quiet over pretty much everything else. That's not normally what people who do computers for job do.

About driving diesel: They pollute much more. Can you comment on that?

    > Diesel and propane both have ~infinite shelf life.

Google disagrees with the comment about diesel fuel. It looks like 6-12 months. Do you really think that generators attached to most large buildings never rotate their diesel fuel supply? I doubt it.

There's a lot of variables there. How well sealed is your tank? Was there much air there? How humid?

Its definitely much shorter than a decade, but if stored really well more than a year is pretty doable. 2+ years can be a gamble though. And if it causes problems, it might cause some serious problems. Want to gamble on your generator during an emergency?

I've definitely had some gas sitting in a tank with stabilizer last a couple of years. I've definitely had gas sitting in a tank go bad in under a year.

I don't know where Google is getting their information from, but I've personally started diesels I know haven't run in 20+yr on the first crank. There are three things that can fuck up a diesel:

1. Air leaks in the fuel system. If any of the negative pressure components have an air leak you'll be sucking air. This means less fuel, but more crucially less lubrication. High pressure injection pumps are meant to be lubricated by fuel.

2. Algae. Sometimes a fuel system can be contaminated by extremophiles that grow in untreated fuel. This will merely clog filters, and in the absence of water or air leaks will cause only fuel starvation and no engine damage.

3. Water. Water will turn into a steam bubble in the vacuum of the suction stroke of the injector pump, and then on the subsequent compression stroke the bubble will cavitate--turn inside out--and blast the wall of the injection pump cylinder with an extremely concentrated high temperature jet. Doing this hundreds of times per second wreaks havoc on the poor engine.

So if your fuel is dry and clean you're good.

For the pollution question, my retort is "which kind?" I claim diesels create more NOx and soot for less CO2. So, which is your priority?

> "Diesel and propane both have ~infinite shelf life."

> "Google disagrees with the comment about diesel fuel. It looks like 6-12 months"

> I don't know where Google is getting their information from, but I've personally started diesels I know haven't run in 20+yr on the first crank.

> So if your fuel is dry and clean you're good.

They are talking about diesel fuel, which definitely has a shelf life without additives to keep it from turning to mush.

It doesn't turn to mush, though. Decades old fuel runs just fine IME. It may not have its full cetane rating but it goes brr anyway.

>For the pollution question, my retort is "which kind?" I claim diesels create more NOx and soot for less CO2. So, which is your priority?

I'd say "it depends". In a dense city I see NOx and soot as being a higher priority. If you're out in the sticks, probably your contribution to global warming (CO2 et al) should be weighted more heavily.

Not many people know that red diesel is simply dyed and only so cops know if you are using it in your car (since it lacks vehicle taxes). Unfortunately, they couldn’t do the same with electrons, so we just pay higher tag fees.

> that I could easily burn in my car, tractor (with PTO generator), or whatever.

Or in a generator, for use in your EV :-) Whereas it will be hard to run your diesel car or tractor on solar power.

It will take quite a long time to charge an EV on solar power (or off a portable generator). The power density is just very inefficient compared to the huge mass of the batteries.

> I have ~200gal of red diesel in a home heating oil tank for the shop that I could easily burn in my car, tractor (with PTO generator), or whatever.

Not defending EV in particular but you can't expect everyone to have that.

Yes, unless they've had the foresight to want it and seek it out.

I have solar panels at home. Electricity is way more fungible than dino fuels.

You actually don’t need a power grid to generate electricity, just a water wheel or some solar panels. I’ve been to some off grid places in China that mostly use water wheels, crazy stuff. Many Alaskan communities aren’t connected by grid to the outside but have local hydro stations to supply all their needs, with maybe diesel as a back up. Hawaiian islands are similar, but with solar instead of hydro.

If the apocalypse comes, EVs will be running for a lot longer than ICEs.

> Only if your power grid is functioning, which I wouldn't expect to be the case in most major disaster situations. Otherwise you'll be stuck burning fuel in a generator to charge your car.

An AM capable emergency radio is a few bucks on Amazon, and they have a hand spin generator next to batteries and a 12V or other wide-range DC input to attach a regular wall wart or a tiny solar panel.

> Not to mention that EVs outmileage every other type of engine in a traffic jam.

A hybrid will be very competitive and likely do better if it's cold (maybe a jam because of a blizzard)

I agree. Also, many modern diesels, like Mercedes Blue-Tec, power down completely when they come to a complete stop, like in a traffic jam. (I don't like the idea, and I frankly find it a bit annoying, but Mercedes does make solid and reliable equipment.)

Gas stations are independent. The energy is already on site. In a real pinch it can be pumped with manu labor.

None of that is true in the EV case.

If you’re in the kind of Mad Max scenario where you are manually pumping gas, you might as well be hotwiring solar panels for your EV while you’re at it.

you could imagine a mad max world having a bank of slaves riding bicycles so manual labor charges batteries to drive a cybertruck

Liquid fuels are relatively light and easy and quick to transfer.

When we had no power for a week, I drove a couple hours away to a gas station, spent 15 minutes filling jerry cans, and came back with enough energy to power my entire house for a week.

Yeah, in a continental or global disaster, we’re quickly going to be unable to get our hands on gasoline without the drilling and refineries and distribution, etc and electricity would be much more available. In the much more frequent and likely regional disaster… I’d prefer to be stuck with gasoline right now.

I could definitely see a future where instead of a noisy generator I power my house off of my car for a week until the charge is getting low, supplemented by some solar, then drive a couple hours to where the electricity is working and spend a half hour charging it back up.

I just don’t think we’re quite there yet. A typical long range EV right now, after the power to get me there and back, would have about 25kWh of power I could use for other things. That would be three hours of driving to replace 3 hours of generator output.

I've actually lived through evacuations of a major metro area...twice.

Both times gasoline quickly became incredibly hard to come by. Electricity would have been a lot easier.

Also, there was massive amounts of traffic trying to leave. An idling car slowly creeping through a 100mi traffic jam still uses a good bit of gas. An EV uses very little energy slowly rolling in the same situation. Sure at normal speeds I would have easily had 300+mi in the gas cars, but my mileage in traffic was massively worse on the 14+ hour drive from Houston to San Antonio.

I have as well, in hurricane zones, but electricity was out for multiple weeks, but gasoline was still available (if quite expensive due to market forces, but of course that meant that there were still a few gallons available for everyone.)

And here come the headlines about gas shortages in Florida. Many hours of idling to go <100mi, stranding cars along the highway. Meanwhile, EVs still charging just fine.

    > spent 15 minutes filling jerry cans, and came back with enough energy to power my entire house for a week.

Wow, this really feels like a stretch!

How much fuel were you using to power your house for a week? I find it hard to believe you can pump more than 100 gallons of fuel in 15 mins.

    > in a continental or global disaster

Have you lived through any of these? If yes, can you provide a real world example, not a hypothetical scenario.

In theory you can fill cans in parallel

Don't even need to...

First off, apparently gas pumps should have a flow rate around 8-10gpm. So 100 gallons is still only ten minutes of pumping.

But also... If you need 100 gallons to keep your house going for the week maybe, I don't know, try turning a couple (hundred) lights off or something for now?

Using 100 gallons over 7 days is 14.3 gallons per day. Assuming you can kill the generator while you're sleeping, figure 16 hours you have it running. So you're using 0.9 gallons per hour. Looking online, looks like for a gasoline generator ~6kWh/gallon is fairly typical.

So you're planning for, averaged out, a 5.5kWh draw continuously every hour you're awake.

If that's your typical power usage, you're looking at 5.51630.4 = 2,675kWh/mo, which at our electricity rates would cost me about $375 just in usage charges to buy from the grid (never mind the connection fees and stuff).

In reality we're using more like 4-6 gallons per day.

Diesel pumps in a truck stop (on the commercial side, where the big rigs fill up) are incredibly fast.

(Side note: I have noticed that the prices on the big rig side of a truck stop are usually slightly higher for the same diesel fuel!)

> How much fuel were you using to power your house for a week? I find it hard to believe you can pump more than 100 gallons of fuel in 15 mins.

Well, maybe you should have stopped after the question and we could have cleared up the confusion!

If I run the generator from morning to night with typical loads, I'm usually burning through about 5-6 gallons a day. So a week of fuel is 35-45 gallons.

Because I know "I actually did it" isn't a good answer, went and looked and the typical flow rate for a gas pump is supposed to be 8-10gpm. So... actual time holding the handle down on the pump, worst case, is about five and a half minutes.

> in a continental or global disaster, we’re quickly going to be unable to get our hands on gasoline without the drilling and refineries and distribution

Did you... disagree with that? Or are you just saying things to say things? Is there a big culture of backyard oil refining where you are? There isn't where I am. I didn't think I needed lived experience to say "if the refineries are shut down and the roads are impassible, oil products are going to be pretty hard to come by".

Ah yes good thing gas stations have an infinite supply of fuel ready to go that'll never need to be replenished in the face of unprecedented demand. Also we're very lucky that gasoline is such a stable material that it'll surely not cause problems in the event of "battle damage".

What is it about EVs that makes you people's brains turn off?

"You people"? Tell me more.

> Also we're very lucky that gasoline is such a stable material that it'll surely not cause problems in the event of "battle damage".

What? Are you saying gasoline burns? Congratulations you cracked the world's greatest mystery! Batteries burn real good too, you should try it sometime it's quite spectacular :D

EDIT: Seriously, though, taking out all the hydrocarbon fuels is a much, much more difficult proposition than taking out the power grid. The environmentalist in me wishes this wasn't true, but it is.

Disturbing the supply chain for both hydrocarbons and electricity is actually scarily easy and in most places those are closely linked anyway. But it really takes a tiny push and the whole system comes crumbling down. Especially if you have adversaries that know what they are doing. There is very little "offline" infrastructure.

I agree with your point. I see this type of comment on HN frequently when EVs are discussed. There is a certain (very vocal) minority of people, that no matter how good is an EV, will only focus on the negatives. It is best to mostly ignore these types of comments, unless they are bringing new ideas to the discussion.

> no matter how good is an EV, will only focus on the negatives

What? I would love to be able to drive EVs. They just don't cut it for the uses I need a vehicle for. Multi-hour recharge times and the weight of batteries make it untenable. Hopefully some day we'll get there, but we're talking an order of magnitude in both the charge and mass dimensions.

you can fast charge a Ford lightning from 15-80% in 40 minutes. slow charging is for when you plug it in overnight. the infrastructure for that isn't everywhere yet, so ymmv (literally), but like gp said, focusing only on the negatives is gonna make you miss the positives.

Same for gasoline right? Focusing on the negatives and you miss the positives?

fair

Gasoline contains energy inertly and can be moved around in almost any container. Electricity almost always relies on a grid that requires uncommon knowledge to tap into. I took the parent comment to mean that LA or NY was in some sort of "zombie apocalypse" scenario in which it's hard to argue that EV's are better than gas.

You don't need grid to get energy from the SUN.

Widespread adoption is non existent.

You need to have battery bank, which many people don't do in places where there is net metering. I've put off installing batteries because currently the utility pays me for power. Unfortunately, this means when the power is out the grid disconnect flips and the solar power goes nowhere. I'll get batteries some day.

A sneak preview happened during the eclipse this year. Those with EVs found large waits for charging on the way home.

https://www.newsweek.com/tesla-charging-station-police-solar...

Any long weekend holiday will also give you that.

Gas stations were no better. The eclipse traveled over many remote areas that never see more than 10 cars/hr on their roads. Suddenly there were thousands all at once. We went to northern NH and the ride back to the NYC area was unreal, taking 11 hours. Thankfully we had the forethought to fill up the morning before the eclipse.

Except that ev “tanks” are full every morning. Besides, all cars are garbage when everyone uses them at once, until Texas finally builds their 200-lane freeway. Give me a bike with wide tires.

Disasters are known to happen at night. Cars can drive on terrain we just usually don't because it's seen as impolite. This isn't about transportation (or the width of your tires) it's about having a layer of security, some storage for more than what you can physically carry, a place to sleep off the ground, and shelter from the weather. Plus, you know, a radio.

you just described a bikepacking bike.

Well, aside from the physical security aspect, sure. There are more than other people to be afraid of. Animals are severely annoying if you're out in the wilderness with something like food.

I own multiple vehicles, every single one of them is capable of going 1000km on a single tank of gas, and seeing as I live close to border with Russia I keep at least one of them (4x4 capable one) at full tank at all times.

What EV can do at least half of that?

EDIT: To add to AM radio in said car I also have CB Radio with detachable (magnetic) antenna, just in case.

Almost nobody behaves like you do, though. At any given moment there are tons of cars in garages that have 10% of a tank.

That is true, but a gas or diesel vehicle can get refilled in 10 minutes, without consuming much power (a small generator is enough to run pumps at a gas station).

And there are 4x4 diesel trucks like Excursions and Suburbans that can carry 8 to 12 people in leather comfort for 700 miles, even over rough terrain (rough terrain shortens your range, just like anything.)

In a scenario where I need to drive many hundreds of miles to get to safety and there is no working infrastructure for charging an EV, I'd expect every gas station to run out of gas pretty darn quickly.

Emergency services can step in and easily provide emergency fuel, charging though?

It’s easier to store, ration, and fill gas for gas cars than electricity for electric ones.

Maybe that won’t always be the case, but it is now.

Electric cars are a luxury atm.

Imagine this: a giant semi-truck loads up and dumps 45,000 gallons of gasoline into invisible, underground tanks in about twenty minutes.

Now, try to imagine that could happen for electricity. (It's the same reason why datacenters always have diesel generators.)

With gas vehicles it's trivial to keep extra fuel in portable containers, if the situation warrants it. That extra range could easily be the difference between getting out of a disaster zone or not.

Heck I'm hardly a prepper or living in a risky area but I have an extra fuel container in my garage simply because I sometimes drive through remote areas and having some extra fuel in the back is a worthwhile safety measure.

This does not seem like a very strong argument. I suspect if there was a massive evacuation there would be a lot of strain on gas stations.

It would be impossible to get fuel. This situation already plays out all the time the the US.

When hurricane Irene hit NYC, you couldn't get fuel in the area for a week. And once it started showing up again you had to wait in 2 hour lines even at 3 AM.

> Satellite radio may, or may not be available as the ground stations that power it require even more advanced transcievers and software to operate and could take months to repair if attacked or destroyed

Not just the ground stations! If we're talking about an attack, the attacker very well might have the capability to shoot down the satellites themselves, too.

AM radio is portable and decentralized. Sure, it can be jammed, but so can pretty much anything else that requires you to send information through the air.

Shooting down satellites is still a very hard, expensive problem. If you have more than a few, chances are nobody will work that hard, without a very good reason.

Still expensive, but now a solved problem. Funny how everyone's focused on satellites and nobody's talking about the society-ending EMP that would probably be triggered here on Terra though.

https://www.csis.org/analysis/there-path-counter-russias-spa...

I agree it can be done, but it's still a hard, expensive problem to actually make happen.

Any world where satellites are being shot down most likely isn't going to be around much longer regardless.

If you are in a car, and you're under the age of 40, you probably don't even know how to switch to your AM radio. Unless you are one of the rare drivers who knows about AM radio and uses it, it's not going to be something you think of using while fleeing a catastophe.

It may have technical merits, just as horseshoes still do (because we do still use horses), but that doesn't mean we should force every car to have it. It certainly could be an option for those who see value in it.

I’m in my 40s and have no way to receive AM broadcasts. My wife and I both have Teslas, and we don’t have any radio tuners in the house. I wouldn’t even notic if the Tesla didn’t have FM either, I’ve lived in my current city for 12 years and couldn’t tell you a single radio station in the city.

AM is dead, and FM is nearly there as well.

I just listened to the 49ers game on AM today while driving, so YMMV. Anyone in the Bay Area should have a go bag for earthquakes and it should probably have an AM radio in it. Old, stable tech is uncool until it is necessary.

I live in a city. All of my vehicles except my motorcycle (no radio) can recieve FM and AM. All of my current and old android phones can get AM/FM. The old boombox I have in the shed, several of my ham radios, clock radio, and some bluetooth swim headphones. And 2 of my TVs.

Also I don't assume that my life experience represents everyone else's but then I don't drive a tesla or go on HN to tell people why they're wrong.

The last one is a lie, but the rest is true.

So your car relies on the very things that may be unavailable in a major disaster scenario? I wonder if we're building insufficient redundancy into our civilisation always assuming all the modern niceties must always be there.

What an out of touch take.

“Me, being successful in my 40s and living in a city with 2 teslas don’t listen to AM or FM radio, so those technologies are dead and should be abandoned”

Well, there's also the data point that demand is so low the AM radio industry has literally gone to congress and asked to make receivers mandatory.

Consumer demand in populated areas sure, but out in the boonies digital radio doesn’t work as well.

Not being popular isn’t a reason to declare something as dead or useless.

Tho none of that is a reason to force auto makers to include AM radio.

> Not being popular isn’t a reason to declare something as dead or useless.

Spectrum is a finite, shared resource. Especially these lower frequency bands.

And AM has use as an emergency utility and FM is more accessible than digital radio.

Why do you keep jumping from AM to digital radio? What does that even mean, are you talking about XM? You do know FM exists and is analog, right?

Digital radio: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_radio

The commenter with the teslas was saying that AM is dead and FM is nearly dead.

Look at the numbers. Fewer people listen to the crappy DJs, payola music, annoying commercials, or hate-wing talk radio. Radio is dying.

There is a difference between "declining" and "dying". The former is descriptive. The latter is a prediction.

There is little debate that radio is declining. To me, it more interesting how it is changing: the audience, the programming, the impact. Whether (and when) radio might completely "die" is a prediction that requires some kind of clarification about the details.

12 years ago I wasn’t nearly as successful, but I did have Bluetooth in my car. Even in my old Hyundai and my wife’s Honda we never used the tuners.

> AM is dead, and FM is nearly there as well.

Overstated and incorrect. (The author reveals their own bubble in the preceding paragraph.)

Word selection matters; there is not point in using "dead" when we have more accurate words like "declining".

Talk is cheap. If the parent commenter wants to make a prediction about if/when AM and/or FM will die, I recommend going to a prediction market and practice making testable predictions. Most people are poorly calibrated. Many people would benefit from seeing how poorly calibrated they are firsthand. Losing is a powerful motivator for course correction.

We just had a news story where an active AM station had its tower stolen and no one noticed until the landscapers reported it was gone.

And what bubble did I reveal, because it could be that I’m able to afford cars that cost ~$30k, like used Teslas or a new Toyota Camry, it could be that I like technology (but that’s mostly a given here), did you mean I’m an early adopter? Stop discounting me and my opinion baselessly by placing me in a bubble you won’t even define. How am I to even discuss with you when you use weasel wording.

> We just had a news story where an active AM station had its tower stolen and no one noticed until the landscapers reported it was gone.

In your local area I presume…

> I’m able to afford cars that cost ~$30k, like used Teslas or a new Toyota Camry, it could be that I like technology (but that’s mostly a given here), did you mean I’m an early adopter

Yeah, exactly. You also mentioned you live in a city, which are pretty dense and don’t require much effort to spread emergency information in. Most people can’t afford new Camrys or teslas at all…

> Stop discounting me and my opinion baselessly by placing me in a bubble you won’t even define

No… and I did define it.

“ being successful in my 40s and living in a city with 2 teslas”

That is not a common situation… especially nowadays where something like 40% of American households would be in danger of a debt spiral when faced with any kind of unexpected $400 bill.

This is the bubble that I was referring to:

> My wife and I both have Teslas

Even if they are bought used at affordable prices, you have convenient access to electric charging, right? This often involves homeownership or relatively high quality housing rentals or employers with that capability. This is a small segment of the population, as I see it. Fair?

This?

https://apnews.com/article/radio-station-tower-stolen-am-fm-...

In context, your comment could easily be read as suggesting the radio tower was so unimportant that zero people noticed something amiss until a landscaping crew saw that it was physically missing.

If so, ok, that would be a pretty big waste of a radio tower. But did it really happen like your comment implies? No regular listeners tuned in and heard … static? Unlikely. Nobody scratched their head? Nobody who worked at the station got curious?

Here is what the article wrote:

> The theft was discovered Feb. 2, when a maintenance crew arrived in the wooded area where the tower once stood and found it gone.

This makes perfect sense because one does typically have to put eyes on the thing (or the lack of it) to conclusively prove that a theft occurred. I don’t think it would be possible to steal a radio tower while it was broadcasting. I don’t think it would be likely that the talk radio guy or DJ would say “sorry the transmission is about to be terminated because the tower is getting stolen.”

Or it was the middle of the night and the station wasn’t broadcasting. Anyhow. This is one of the sadder and more hilarious windows into what people will do for money. Where do you sell a stolen AM radio tower? How much is it worth?

I discovered that simply attaching a long wire to the phono input on an amplifier enabled me to hear AM radio.

That would have to be all AM radio at once, or perhaps a local cable radio?

The AM station with the strongest signal drowned out the others.

> There arent any alternatives for major catastrophes that can top amplitude modulated radio.

OK, then ensure the radio stations actually have people in them. Otherwise, it's a false sense of security:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minot_train_derailment

> Because it was the middle of the night, there were few people at local radio stations, all operated by Clear Channel with mostly automated programming. No formal emergency warnings were issued for several hours while Minot officials located station managers at home.

It would be pretty easy for (say) a Chinese car maker to jam all AM radio in the entire country.

Sure, but that’s not a good argument against its usefulness in an extreme natural disaster.

Also like… I doubt regulations would stop them from doing that, if that was their goal.

Maybe we need a standard AM emergency broadcast frequency akin to 121.5 on aircraft. Legislate that all fixed and car radio receivers are always tuned to it and activate automatically if there’s a broadcast. Then scrap the rest of the analogue radio broadcasting band.

> Then scrap the rest of the analogue radio broadcasting band.

Please, no. In case of disaster, I could dismantle a tool, take its motor, fix it to a fan propeller, connect it to a rectifier stage and obtain a wind/water generator, then I could take parts from low tech stuff not even remotely related to a radio and build a crude but functioning transmitter to send a SOS. Problem is that making it work on a certain frequency would be hard without instrumentation, therefore the more ears on multiple frequencies the best chances that some of them will hear my dit dah by mistake.

Exactly. We are on Hacker News, after all. If there's any place that should be understanding of the need for ears on amplitude modulated frequencies, it should be us.

As it stands, ~nobody is listening to AM radio. The only people listening are radio geeks, and I doubt that number would change if the analogue radio broadcasting band was scrapped.

Having an emergency frequency that devices auto-tune to would at least mean if you did manage to broadcast on that frequency, someone will actually hear it.

It's good to have some sort of communication during a disaster. There are many solutions, but you do not really have a reason to have AM legislated into a car.

I don't understand why people are arguing against this. It's pennies to continue the service and utilizing an established system. All you have to do is say "yep, looks good". Why close this door?! There's literally no upside.

Why can't Emergency Alert System provide the same service.

As we continue to expand our Satellite System, this becomes even moot as we can broadcast via SOS text messages

> AM radio can be transmitted with a roll of wire and a relatively simple transciever from an FOB or refugee camp.

Don't forget it can be listened to using a crystal radio set that is powered from the radio waves. No batteries needed and it can't be detected. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_radio#%22Foxhole_radio...

I don't know what the situation is like in the US, but I was shocked to discover that there are no AM stations in my part of Canada. It is cool in tje sense that I can direct my antenna and pick up stations in Newfoundland and New York on a good evening, without dealing with interference from local stationd, but it would be positively useless in emergency situations. Even if distant stations broadcast useful information during an emergency, picking it up in a vehicle is unreliable. If the antenna is directional, the strength of the signal is going to vary wildly based upon the vehicle's orientation. If the antenna is not directional, you are going to have trouble with interference.

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely believe that broadcast radio is an essential tool during emergencies. I buy phones with FM receivers and have backup battery packs. I have an AM/FM/SW reveiver with backup batteries. I have a VHF transceiver, and am licensed to use it in both amateur and maritime bands. But, realistically, I don't see how most people would benefit from the few advantages that the AM broadcast band offers. You would likely be better off improving the resiliance of FM broadcast infrastructure. Even then one must accept its days are numbered.

I was hiking in remote Tasmania once, using an AM radio to try to get weather forecasts as there was possibility of snow which would affect one part of our walk. I was getting up pre-dawn to listen, and found that I could not tune in to any local stations, but was able to pick one up from about 2000km away. I figure this is due to the radio waves bouncing off the ionosphere (as intended), but the angle possible with this is relatively shallow, so a greater distance is better than a shorter distance when you haven't got line of sight (there were mountains in the way of most nearby cities).

The moral of the story is to ensure that the broadcasting station needs to describe its location clearly (and the listener to listen for the station's location), as it may be a _long_ way away.

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.

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.)

Sure, but who's going to pay for this? Satellites (especially geostationary ones) are expensive. And SiriusXM doesn't provide a worthwhile service that compels enough people to subscribe; it's a wonder it's still in business. The main function of a music subscription service is to listen to music, but have you ever listened to SiriusXM? The audio is so compressed that it sounds terrible.

Yea I agree. AM seems like the most viable.

Exactly: AM doesn't require a network of satellites and terrestrial repeaters to be maintained just to provide some emergency public-service info with lousy audio quality. AM does this just fine, for very little cost on both sides (transmitter and receiver).

Not sure if anyone would ever consider doing this due to the collateral damage, but I think a retrograde GEO orbit would work fine for destroying a lot of GEO Sats. You would need to spread out your impactor by detonating it but the fragments would have 6 km/s relative to the GEO Sats.

Hmm, thanks, that sounds plausible enough. Have you seen this possibility discussed anywhere?

Not really, and I couldn’t find something like that from a quick googling. Maybe it wouldn’t work as good as I would think. I’m not sure if it’s really a realistic threat anyways, because polluting GEO is basically half way to a nuclear war. Kesslerizing LEO is probably bad but not forever and more easily avoided by picking another orbit. Making GEO impossible would really annoy every country out there.

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.)

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.

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.

AM radio then. If you want internet, get a starlink.

So a localized total outage? Weird that the farmer had no idea everything was in the one spot.

Yes, wouldn't be the first time

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/06/georgian-woman... (not a farmer but still)

That doesn't say that power is out, which is what is described up thread and what I meant by "total".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003

No power, so no internet, cell service was overloaded and didn't work because of that, and well.. all that was was left was the radio.

I lived through that.

I don't remember how I found out what was going on, and the university I was near still had their power station up, so I may have had better local comms (it was small and not real tied to the grid, mostly used for heating).

I certainly didn't spend time huddled around an AM radio.

Evacuation notices can be, and are, announced on AM radio during emergencies.

Having lived in disaster prone areas, people tend to be glued to the TV and radio before, during and after to get updates on the situation. TV and the internet are the first to go with the power, and even if you have a generator, that doesn't mean your internet connection will work. Radios will.

I don't think the OP's point was that SiriusXM was being used for emergency coordination, but the lack of a traditional radio in the car forgoes the existing emergency radio infrastructure.

Having lived in (and still do) disaster prone areas, people often don't even own radios outside of that thing they get annoyed by when their car turns on before bluetooth/Android Auto/Carplay connects and don't bother with any way of watching TV that doesn't involve the internet.

Pretty rare to have people actually listen to AM radio or OTA TV for a massive chunk of the population.

I was in a disaster zone without internet (or electric, except for my car) for two weeks. You are right, but neighbors end up sharing information pretty quickly when their preferred means of communication (ie internet, mobile phones) stop working. (AM radio still worked and could be received from a great distance, and TV might have been working, but I'm not sure because I didn't have a generator for the first ten days and after that it was for refrigerator and clothes washer.)

Backup powers on cell towers lasts hours at most. After that they have to be individually reconfigured for generator powers and regularly refueled.

TV and radio stations are centralized, there's no millions of AM cell towers distributed throughout regions. You tow the power car or a fuel truck next to the station and it'll be good for multiple days minimum.

The scenario you ask about is exactly why I subscribed to Sirius XM in the first place.

During the time I had Sirius XM, the entire point for me was to continuous radio coverage as I drove across remote parts of Appalachia where cellular, AM, and FM coverage inconsistent.

The main argument for satellite radio is to have it out in the big receptionless areas expanses, so relying on cell signal defeats a major part of the purpose!

My family's newest car came with Sirius radio and a free subscription that lasted a few months. We let it lapse. Chances are, the lack of market interest is what kills subscription radio. AM and FM are free.

Sirius wants $40/m for their space radio and most people have unlimited data plans without coverage gaps.

I'd bite if it was around $5 per month. Alas, their lowest $10 plan is going to use my data plan on cell networks

I had a new car that also came with a Sirius radio and 3 months free. I tried it, but found it often dropped out while driving through forested roads in my area. That made it annoying to listen to. I stopped using it.

One thing I've found with the subscription services is that their "stations" are too homogeneous. I mean, I like jazz and classical, but I can't listen to just one style within those genres for hours -- especially while driving. And if you've got unlimited data, then there are free online "FM" stations, including NPR. WFMT out of Chicago rarely disappoints.

And the threat of having to pay for it limited my interest in exploring it any further.

>Modern cars in the US... are not only dropping AM radio but also now SiriusXM satellite radio

What's wrong with that? It's utter garbage. Only a fool would spend money on a subscription to it. You'd get better audio quality from a 1970s-vintage tape deck.

>In an emergency, cellular will be the first to go.

As will all bank transfers.

I'm starting to sound like a crazy prepper for keeping enough cash and batteries to run my life for a week.

It's like people assume that if the internet dies they will too so there's no point thinking about it. Makes me wonder if living in areas what have natural disasters which knock off power once every few years vs ones that don't makes people think differently about this.

The manufacturers' chief objection seems to be that EV motors interfere with AM signals, therefore the AM band needs to go away. Not an EE, but for what little I understand of FCC mandated EM compliance testing, this seems like an absolutely ridiculous argument and I hope the automakers are swiftly and harshly taken to task for it.

I haven't been in the business for a while, but I remember learning that the EM compliance rules have some special carve-outs for electric motor control systems.

Also it seems like the interference shouldn't occur if the vehicle is not moving or is turned off, and that's still useful for emergency situations.

But then you are merely equipping the car with emergency equipment, so why not a knife and water filters?

I know you're being sarcastic, but it seems like EVs should probably also come standard with a glass breakage device for fast escape.

I generally don't find reductio ad absurdum arguments very convincing.

For example: seat belts and air bags add extra cost (a lot more than an AM radio), maybe they should be optional too?

As far as I can tell, electric cars are regular old FCC 15b devices, but the emission limits are generous enough that an AM radio can't operate from inside of one, the same way you wouldn't expect an AM radio sitting on top of a generator to do well.

Thanks this is interesting context

That is interesting from a mass-implementation standpoint. I wonder how many Tesla vehicles working right next to each other would squash AM reception for a given radius around the group of cars with current EM emissions.

In theory, they could form some sort of phased array beamforming to fuck one guy in particular, but ignoring that sort of targeted malice, and assuming non-correlated noise and a non-directional receiving antenna, the inverse square law would dominate and the overwhelming majority of the interference would just be the closest Tesla, not the total volume of Teslas.

Any chance they could unintentionally synchronize by interfering with each other? Many systems naturally do this but I'm unfamiliar with inverters on this level so I have no idea if it's feasible or not. Maybe car manufacturers have thought of this and intentionally use slightly different frequencies across vehicles or just shield their clock source from interference?

It would not surprise me in the slightest if someone has considered using coherent wave forming from electric vehicles as a targeting mechanism. In a malicious-actor scenario, EVs often have GPS which can provide a pretty accurate time-synchronization mechanism. With enough collected GPS points to eliminate significant error and fine-control over the inverter phase/frequency it seems that it would definitely be a possibility given the number of EVs in many urban areas. Heck, most EVs are even internet connected for software updates.

I have (my kid has actually) a 2022 Nissan Leaf with AM receiver. Perhaps newer EV designs are different in some way, such as the placement of the electric motors. Stellantis has stated they moved the radio receiver components away from the EV related systems to maintain good reception.

AM antennae are simple affairs -- usually just a stick of carbon with a tiny spool of wire around it. Seems like you could just relocate it to an end of the vehicle and put a bit of shielding around it. If that doesn't do it, then the car is a massive emissions vehicle. (pun intended)

The FCC interference requirements are designed to prevent your usage from interfering with others. It's perfectly acceptable to interfere with radio signals for yourself. Anyone who grew up in the 90's and had a car without a built in CD player has used an FM-transmitter to broadcast the audio of a portable CD player to their radio, interfering with any other FM signals on that frequency, albeit in a very small area around the car.

Clarification: everyone in the US. These small transmitters were not legal in many other parts of the world

Still useful today. I still use an Avantree (https://avantree.com/collections/bluetooth-transmitters-rece...) on my visor everyday to broadcast from my bluetooth phone to my early 2000's vehicles with "vintage" AM/FM/CD stereos that I think are really cool and I'm quite unwilling to downgrade just to get bluetooth.

Kind of ridiculous for something that could be solved by a paper thin wrap of copper mesh around the motor.

Years ago I met someone who was a high up / owner of a EM testing facility.

He took me of a tour of his facility, and we went into chambers that were radio and acoustic silent. I then asked, "uhm, normally electronics aren't this big, what are you testing in these?"

"Oh, we test cars for EM in here"

"Uhm, those doors seem a little small for a car. Are you testing the Tesla?" (At the time, the very first Tesla Roadster wasn't on the market, but it was probably the only car I could think of that would fit through the doors.)

He then lowered his voice and got very cagey. "We don't talk about our customers" was his response.

A few minutes later the tour ended in his office. He asked me to walk around his desk. There were pictures of him all over the Tesla Roadster, clearly excited to have it grace his presence.

The funniest thing: He wasn't allowed to drive the Roader.

(Conversation is paraphrased)

---

Ironically, I wonder how easy/hard it will be to have a functional AM radio in an electric car. Is it one of those things where all you need to do is twist the right arm, or is it something that's practically impossible?

Put the antenna on the roof and the receiver at the buttom of the antenna.

ICEs have electric motors too.

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.

Digital radio remains working at much worse SNR than intelligible fuzzy analog.

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.

You may find the MELP Vocoder and history interesting: https://melp.org/ (MIL-STD-3005)

MELP targets 2.4kbps, and there are later examples for even lower bitrates (e.g. 1.2kbps, 600bps)

One thing to keep in mind is that a lot of these codecs or technologies are designed to operate at very low bit rates because the signal carrier is required to be capable of operation in "contested environments" where jamming and/or other environmental effects are present (and throughput potential is the tradeoff for assurance).

Citation needed.

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.

There isn't an FEC format that uses Opus over a radio signal. We could make one, but analog AM is the best we have for extremely wide area robust voice broadcast.

The claim was:

> Digital radio remains working at much worse SNR than intelligible fuzzy analog.

Your opus codec needs to demodulate the signal first.

Both of those things can be true, the smaller the bandwidth is you need the more extra information you can pack in your channel width to make it possible to reconstruct a lot of data errors. And modern digital codecs can squeeze data much further than plain analog audio, hence it's easier to get it to go long distances if the system were to have that as a design goal.

Yup, but I was also specifically pointing out that opus is quite tolerant of missing data (part of the article). With 90% data loss you can still pretty intelligibly understand what is being said.

So long as you can get pops of decodable signal, you'll be able to understand what's being said. Using a more robust modulation scheme would also go a long way in improving reach.

AM gets it's range benefits not from the modulation used, but from the frequencies it occupies.

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.

A lot of the complaint for "I used to get channel x before the digital transition now I can't" is often because channel x got remapped from VHF to UHF.

When the migration from NTSC to ATSC happened, the transmitter power was often reduced by a large factor as well.

Is capable of, but does not currently. This isn't an argument for turning off AM radio.

FM radio will still exist afaik. Nobody in my country used AM for a decade now.

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.

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)

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.

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

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.

No much to a coil, antenna and a germanium diode.

The geranium diode is doing most of the heavy lifting. Good luck building that from scratch.

https://rimstar.org/science_electronics_projects/razor_blade...

Galena cat whiskers were quite common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_detector

And how is that relevant to the alleged complexity of building an AM radio vs an FM one? The point was that the latter is easy, not complicated. The FM transmitter is so easy to make that you can make one by accident - if there's a non-linear element in the rf part.

Its about the simplicity of the circuit. The components are available for any electronic Technician.

Use an amplifier is not a basic circuit. Resistor diode capacitor cable and power source are the basic of electronics

You can actually receive FM very simply. Here was an amusing post on Reddit [1] a few years ago from someone who was trying to make a simple audio amplifier and found that it was receiving his local NPR station which was broadcasting FM on 88.3 MHz. After some experimenting he got it down to just a cheap op amp, 2 capacitors, 1 potentiometer, a 9 V battery, a speaker, and some wire for an antenna.

It is working through slope detection. Basically if you've got FM at frequency X carrying voice and you measure the energy at a frequency a little bit away from X, as the FM signal frequency varies due to the voice modulation the energy you measure near X will vary in a similar way, so your voice modulation of the frequency X becomes amplitude modulation of your energy measurement.

You can play with this on an SDR, such as a cheap RTL-SDR dongle. Find an FM station and tune to its center frequency with your SDR software set for FM demodulation, and verify that you are indeed on an FM station broadcasting voice and/or music. Then switch the SDR software to AM demodulation and start slowly tuning away from the FM center frequency. You should find a point where you can clearly hear the voice and/or music. It won't sound great compared to FM demodulation of the same station, or compared to an AM station, but it should be serviceable for receiving emergency information.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/HamRadio/comments/oz5rri/i_accident...

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.

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.

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.

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.

The problem is the amount of Bandwidth taken at the lower frequency.

The bandwidth is the dealbreaker. Commercial FM radio has a necessary bandwidth of 270KHz. That’s not a lot when your carrier frequency is around 100,000KHz. It’s a whole lot when your carrier is around 1000KHz.

For comparison, commercial AM mono bandwidth is 10KHz. SSB AM ham radios use 2.4KHz.

Commercial AM has a 5kHz bandwidth (4.5kHz in Europe), commercial FM 50kHz (29kHz if mono). The remainder of the channel is guardband.

Source for 270: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM_broadcasting. Search there for “necessary bandwidth”.

For AM, that’s 5KHz+-, or 10 total.

The broadcast AM band is 1.6MHz wide. Broadcast FM stations are spaced at 200KHz intervals, of which about 150KHz is used for modulation and the remaining ~50KHz is used for guard bands.

Thus, current standards, the entirety of the broadcast AM spectrum can support no more than 8 concurrent FM broadcasts in a region.

And maybe that "works," but it certainly doesn't leave much room for competing markets.

When multiple stations with wide propagation all use a singular frequency, they have to be geographically spaced quite far apart: The hypothetical Toronto station centered at 1330KHz station would step on the Detroit station at the same frequency, which would step on the Chicago and Cincinnati stations.

And, sure: One could give one channel to each market to reduce this co-channel interference, but then there's not enough density for any meaningful competition.

(And our band of capitalism requires competition in order to even begin to work.)

Long range FM does not work because of the multipath effect. Even on 29.6 MHz it's quite pronounced.

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.

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.

Growing up in the 80s we would regularly listen to WKBW out of Buffalo in Virginia. AM has amazing range.

FM has less issues with interference (which is critical if you want to deliver a message) and quality (which you will care about for music)

FM definitely wins for audio quality. But if you are facing a major national disaster where Internet may be down in various places, you need to have AM. The quality is plenty good enough in most cases. Even in the worst cases, it rarely performs worse than a traditional phone call. Really, the quality issues become apparent mostly because you can easily get partial reception on stations that are extremely far away, leading you to think that the technology is inherently bad. It's not a binary success outcome like digital TV signals. When AM radio was more popular I would often listen to AM stations, with some of them being pretty far away. Back in the days before the Internet, radio was THE way to get informed.

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.

All new cars have (at minimum) 2G connectivity already as well.

Then whatever decision Congress makes will have no affect on you

It can be used as an example on why AM should be killed.

> FM radio will still exist afaik. Nobody in my country used AM for a decade now.

Some fool has downvoted you for making a factual statement.

It is indeed the case that long and medium wave (AM radio) broadcasts have ceased in Ireland and several other countries; FM and DAB only here. Whether this was prudent thing to do for reasons of emergency broadcasting is a different question.

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?

Analogue doesn’t degrade gracefully. Every time you drive under a power line it becomes completely unintelligible. Meanwhile digital radio can use error correction to maintain perfect quality under heavy interference.

This sounds like a signal strength (or maybe frequency?) issue more than an advantage of digital. I sometimes hear people report the opposite of your experience, but many factors play into that.

Your point about error correction and perfect quality is noteworthy. Yes, if there is some data loss, error correction can maintain perfect quality, but once that fails, it fails badly. And it's not even all-or-nothing: The radio may, due to an arbitrary firmware configuration, refuse to tune into a stream that is still partially intelligible if it deems the signal integrity or strength to be insufficient. Even very damaged digital streams can be somewhat useful, if you can deal with lovely artifacts like piercing chirping noises when the decoder doesn't know what do to with garbled data.

Yeah when my national tv is transitioning from analog to digital, in some conditions where the analog channels quality degrade, the digital channel fail completely.

Digital tv can degrade gracefully. It just looks different. Instead of fuzz it looks like missed iframes which create blocky artifacting on movement or when switching cameras.

I’ve always wanted to drive in circles under power lines listening to the Jethro Tull Christmas special!

To be able to decode under heavy interference you need heavy error correction in the digital hardware and in the standard. Nobody designs space-grade consumer radios. You are basically limited with the bits you have and the recovery you have, no more. A really bad digital signal is unintelligible by definition. It is a sharp cutoff when you reach the limit.

However an analog signal is ehmm .... an analog of the original. It is continuous. So the error is also analog and you're only limited by the average case. The signal degradation is also analog, there is no sharp cutoff. So as long as human brain can extract the information from the noise, analog continues to work.

if you design the protocol well you could easily make a digital signal degrade cleanly. rather than sending a plain signal, break it up into a low, medium and high fidelity version where the higher fidelity versions store extra frequency info but the low quality ones have more error correction

Space Grade? Only in the sense that it’s technology we mastered in the 1950s. Error correction is a feature of radio transceivers that cost pennies.

Internet radio has MANY potential points of failure, particularly during emergency situations, when electric power is unreliable, or out for many days.

AM radio has a"head office " situation, studio and broadcast transmitter, both of which normally have emergency power supply's and generators capable of sustaining the station for several days. AM radio in cars can operate from car batteries. AM has significantly longer range than FM. Satellite radio , would be nowhere as wide spread as AM radio in cars. ( On a unrelated note, it is my opinion that the mobile phone network should have reliability standards for power supply - ie base stations and other network elements would keep operation if the commercial/ public electric supply was down - as often happens in emergency situations - like floods / cyclones / hurricanes / typhoons " Electric car makers need to try much harder to reduce their vehicles Radio Frequency Interference or RFI

There's just so many cell towers compared to radio broadcast stations. The very nature of the frequencies demand it. You would need ~$1m upgrades to every tower to retrofit with generators capable of lasting more than a week.

I think it would have a huge impact on monthly bills for cell service. Likely one that the general subscriber would not appreciate given the rarity of a knockout event.

In these more rural areas where it's more likely for trees to take out the power supply and restoration takes a long time, adding solar and battery backup would be much cheaper, and might even make it's cost back in reduced power cost during non-emergency times.

> On a unrelated note, it is my opinion that the mobile phone network should have reliability standards for power supply

Maybe they should, but they don't. In my neck of the woods, towers start dropping off after 4 hours, and in 6 hours, they're all gone. I don't have a real landline, but my DSL line has zero seconds of run time when utility power drops; sometimes I get lucky and the DSLAM maintains service through a trip/reclose event, but usually that's enough to drop the connection and then I have to reboot my modem because the two ends won't resync otherwise. (NBD, I have automation)

When I have an outage of any kind in my area the towers go offline after just a few minutes. If the power is off in the area, everyone pulls out their phone and starts using it for data. The towers can't handle that many active units and I lose service.

Arguing that AM "has significantly longer range" is quite foolish. The range of AM on the long wave band is the entire Earth, in some cases many times over. We use to allow very high power AM stations in the US that covered all of North America but that was phased out.

We still do allow this on the shortwave bands under very limited circumstances like WBCQ.

I recently huddled around a radio with friends and neighbors to see if there were any updates on restoring our power, water, internet or cell service in NC post-Helene. Pretty sure it was FM but I reallllly didn’t expect to ever “need” radio again!

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.

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/

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!

> I'd rather the radios be in cell phones since they're more likely to be with you and powered on in a disaster!

It would have to be a very short disaster, because your cell battery is going to die before the day is out. I've only changed the batteries in my AM/FM shower radio once since I bought it a decade ago.

That's true but we also have a lot of simple solutions for charging cell phones: powerbanks, solar and hand winders, transfer power from a laptop, small generators, and on top of that is charging from vehicles. Electric cars might not even start in extreme weather events and gasoline usually faces immediate shortages.

I think there's some cases where the medium is part of the experience, Radio Caroline in the UK are a former offshore pirate who used AM by necessity in their heyday (they'd anchor the ship just outside of British territorial waters to circumvent the BBC monopoly). The revival station worked hard to convince Ofcom to let them operate on AM given their historic connection to the medium, but they were granted a licence and are probably one of the few AM stations in the UK not in terminal decline.

I'll miss Five Live on 693 kHz, I grew up coming back from Watford games with it on in the car crackling as we went under power lines. Test Match Special on 198 kHz longwave is already gone in preparation for Droitwich's closure.

The AM radio community is definitely small and kind of niche, but I always had more fun listening to Coast to Coast on a late night road trip than I ever did listening to FM.

> the radio is not only for the use in the car.

this is something that I think is being overlooked.

This is the most important use of AM radio in cars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelers%27_information_stati...

which side of the line did you intend to place yourself with that statement?

I found that AM radio had so much interference 20 years ago listening to Radio Disney that I gave up. (oh god. That might be closer to 30yrs now)

Dipping my toes into software defined radios (RTL-SDR, and a HackRF), I found AM to be incoherent in my area.

So, what exactly is there to save? It's obvious there's an agenda- FCC already has enough latitude to allow low power FM broadcasts to replace AM ones without external involvement.

bloomberg radio has been my go to station for the past 16 years or so since it broadcasts in some major markets and i have no difficulty getting signal even at night. it is way better than using internet radio with buggy apps and where they inject an ad right before the stream starts playing.

They just sold their AM in the bay, (or at least at the beginning of the month it went to some sports talk radio)

Was at a rest stop and heard talking coming from a box on a pole. It was reading out the weather in TTS voice, guessing it was the transmitter for one of these stations.

It was probably NOAA Weather Radio.

https://www.weather.gov/nwr/

Which is not AM

Which is why I think this whole thing is really dumb. You know what would be actually useful for requiring in cars that wouldn't otherwise be included? A NOAA weather radio mode in the car, along with the option to have it automatically alert me when it detects an alert. In a disaster I'll be listening to that, not trying to hunt down an AM radio station I haven't willingly listened to in decades.

cool we should add that to the mandate and lets toss in some of the emergency bands while we're at it. chips are cheap these days.

NOAA provides weather, but it isn’t going to tell you specific evacuation routes, or provide relevant news.

Emergency alerts are automatically broadcast over NOAA weather radio.

You can get home receivers that monitor NOAA radio for emergency alerts tones and will automatically switch on in a disaster.

It's a great feature, every home should have one.

I've definitely heard evacuation information broadcast over NOAA radio. Have you been in a mass evacuation before?

Lol, every country listed on your linked Wikipedia page (except US and Japan) use FM.

I think you succeeded in motivating for the opposite of what you intended...

We’re talking about US legislation though. So it’s very relevant.

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

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.

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.

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.

It was stock in my 2003 Forester that we eventually got rid of due to head gasket problems.

I had a 2002 Outback wagon for a while with weather band in the stock radio. I rather liked it for rolling across country during the winter - with a good set of snow tires, that car was pretty much unstoppable!

... and wisdom also suggested that when you realize you've not seen semis on the road for a good while from how bad the snow is, you should take the hint and go find a spot to sleep for a while until things improve.

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.

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.

What’s the total bandwidth of the AM band? Does it make sense to reclaim it for wide area wireless networking?

The width of the AM radio band in the US is just a shade over 1 MHz, so there's not much room.

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.

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.

A portable AM radio costs 10 bucks. Should we also mandate that cars come with first aid kit, a flashlight or defibrillator?

You think you're making a joke, but many countries do regulate that cars come with basic safety equipment. France is just one example.

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.

Is life not as valuable in the US? Or are there fewer crashes?

The typical first aid kit doesn’t have anything that is likely to save someone’s life—and if it did I’m pretty sure the typical person wouldn’t know what to do with it.

Most car first aid kits have an emergency/space blanket which would very much save someone's life and require no training. Also plastic bags as occlusive bandages, gauze and triangle bandages for bleeding control which require a 1-4 hour class.

Emergency blanket requires no training but people need to know it exists and how well it can solve the problem of being cold. And also yeah you get soaked in your own condensed sweat.

In a car where space and weight aren’t major concerns probably carrying one of those blue tarps is more useful in general. I’ve basically never seen the stuff being listed in a standard first aid kit though. Certainly not the one that came with my car. In winter just want some spare warm clothing too.

Reminds me I need to go through the winter kit I carry.

If you don't happen to have a suitable handkerchief a first aid kit might be very useful.

In the context of the article "congress" is the USA. I'm not sure where you get the notion that I might be suggesting either of those things.

Wouldn't be a terrible idea.

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.

I also think the marginal cost of making a FM radio an AM/FM radio is less than $10. Probably more like $1?

Yes an AM receiver is extremely simple.

> 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.

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.

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

The issue is that lots of things might be useful, be in the USA we dont typically mandate useful.

It’s going to be very situational. What you should probably carry in Death Valley is pretty different from a Midwest winter.

Having an AED in every car would be really nice.

Just put a couple of leads from the starter. That should apply a good enough jolt

Cost benefit ratio would be very low

> 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.

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 €15, 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.

In the US some cars just have run flats. But the common case is to just have a donut spare even in cars that can theoretically go off-roading. I suppose the logic is a full size spare takes a lot of room and there are a lot of things that can go wrong beyond a flat and people who use their cars off-road will outfit as needed.

Removing the spare tire shaves 20-40lbs off the weight of the car. Manufacturers are more strongly incentivized to lower fleet average fuel economy and emissions, which reducing weight does, and more so than they are incentivized to provide adequate safety equipment like a spare tire. So, you get a can of goo and an air compressor.

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.

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.

Because the car has been the only place a radio might be located for the last few decades not because it was a great option in and of itself. Wanting to mandate emergency radios be made available to every person is a matter in and of itself. Even implementing distribution as part of getting a new car is a separate topic. Requiring it be built in to the structure of the car is neither a good option for safety or a good option for efficiency. The only reason we're even discussing it is it was the last place to use it normally.

Consider a hurricane evacuation where you need to have a way to provide real time information for people in their vehicles trying to leave the area. Cell service is down. You can't provide emergency workers to direct traffic.

This is exactly why we should still have AM radio in cars, and why you still see signs on the highway about tuning into X AM station for emergency updates.

"Voting with your wallet" works for small and frequent purchases. The bigger and less frequent the purchase, the less impact it has.

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

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.

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.

That didn't work out very well for consumers buying GM cars that sold their driving data out the back door to insurance companies.

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.

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.

This seems like a super important fact for the discussion. Do you have a cite that it really constrains the rest of the car?

"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.

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?

No, but they would to avoid customer complaints at the dealer level - I dont think its a huge cost to add needed filtering.

If the reason for keeping an AM radio is really emergencies, then they could keep it in but only have it work when the car is stationary/motor is off. Rebrand it as "emergency radio" rather than AM radio so people don't complain.

RE "...they should have to do anyhow to comply with Part 15....." Yes I agree 110% So should al the manufactures of LED lights and numerous other gadgets ....

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.

Does that also mean that those cars could potentially be responsible for tons of interference in the AM band in the future?

My belief? yes, it does. The motor controllers are noisy.

If so, it's interesting the FCC hasn't stepped in since nearly all electronics need that certification.

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.

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

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...

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.

No, the inclusion of AM radio will not be an actual dealbreaker for anyone, anywhere, who is buying a vehicle, so "voting with their wallets" is not a thing that will happen. Even for me, an amateur radio operator, I won't skip over a vehicle choice just because it didn't include AM radio. It's absolutely the kind of thing for the government to regulate, because individuals cannot make enough of a dent to affect whether AM radio is included, nor are they generally thinking about the criteria that a government regulator will consider, nor do individuals even care or realize what they are missing.

The China Government seems to be referencing the USA and EU regulations to also mandate it for vehicles in China

https://www.nrta.gov.cn/art/2024/9/19/art_114_68922.html

translated : https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=en&text=https%3A%2F...

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.

I agree with that wholeheartedly. If a neighbor’s car is illegally transmitting on frequencies it’s not licensed for, and the neighbor’s the rare sort of jerk I would be afraid to talk to about it, I wouldn’t have qualms about reporting it to the FCC along with timestamped logs of when and on what frequencies. It could be entertaining to see the feds slap an injunction on someone to prevent them from starting their car.

(NB: It’s way better to talk to your neighbors, obviously. I think we all know at least one knucklehead who wouldn’t respond to reason. I’d reserve this drastic measure for that sort of situation.)

I got news for you, power lines interfere with AM radio too. Guess we need Congress to do something about those too.

I got news for you: they already did https://www.arrl.org/power-line-noise

It's such a no-brainer to keep the AM option, I'm not sure why this is controversial.

It's like we've become so comfortable we've forgotten the experience of a disaster. So comfortable with our phones always being on.

Who wants digital lock in during an Emergency.

Phone : Alert. "We've been notified there is an Emergency in your area, please download the app to find out more"

I have a vehicle w/o AM radio, and our local traffic authority uses an AM station for traffic and other civil alerts. It's really annoying that it is absent.

The FM is also an afterthought, the antenna system under-performs horribly, and appears to actually be //inside// the cabin.

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

The way to do this is with MA3, not traditional AM:

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/12/03/2020-25...

"In addition, digital broadcasting allows visual and other metadata, such as song and artist identification, station identification, and emergency information, to be transmitted along with the audio content."

https://www.radioworld.com/tech-and-gear/upgrading-an-am-to-...

It looks like MA3 has a longer range:

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

Why does it feel like regulations always have a well defined safety argument and a less defined, less “important” argument to the contrary?

A recent software update enables AM radio in Ford EVs: https://es.ford.com/support/how-tos/ford-technology/software...

In the Vancouver area of British columbia, Canada, an important AM station recently went defunct: AM 730 Traffic. That was like the only reason to tune into AM anything around here while driving, unless you're into talk radio. Problem with that traffic station model is that you don't have a captive audience. Once the listener groks the traffic situation for their trip, they flip to another station (more likely than not FM, by the way) or their bluetooth or wired connection to their phone. That listener heard one or two ads at most (often none at all). People not driving have no reason to listen, either.

All the music stations encourage people to listen all day. "We are here for you while you work, or for your entire drive."

wtf, they shut down AM 730? That's brutal. It used to be essential listening on the drive out to work, back when I actually drove to/from work.

In Utah there can be blinding snowstorms that trap people in their cars on the side of the road. There are public service signs every so often, "for weather tune to AM 830" or something like that. It's great to pass one of those signs when there's a bunch of snow coming down. It helps you make a decision whether or not you should pull off and get a hotel room.

Could they move to FM? Yes, but FM reception could be dodgy in a snowstorm, especially when going through mountain passes. Knowing what I know from my HAM radio training, AM radio is fantastic in emergencies. One tiny little station can blast out a signal that can be heard from halfway across the country if given enough umph. Being on the lower bands, AM punches through the storm better too. It makes a lot of sense to put emergency and national weather stations on the AM bands. They're cheaper to run, and they work better in emergencies.

Some commenters here talking about right-wing political radio and sports wanting their AM radio bands available. People who listen to right-wing political radio don't do so from AM, or at least they don't need to. Podcasts and even FM stations out in red Utah are usually reached for first by my friends who listen to them.

I remember driving through the "four corners" area where Utah, New Mexico, Colorado and Arizona meet. It's a place home to many American Indian nations. It also has terrible cellphone reception. The first time I bought a paper map in years was when I went down there. You couldn't find your way otherwise.

I think of places like that when they talk about getting rid of AM. There's not a lot of money in AM radio, not compared to all the other media. At the end of the day, if you live in a _very_ rural place, AM radio may be your only source. I remember listening to a Navajo Radio station like this one[1]. The announcer spoke in Navajo. I remember driving through the reservation. It seriously feels like the 1930s. Frame houses but without any electricity plumbing or heating. The people in these regions are terribly poor.

For safety reasons detailed above, I would not drive a car without AM radio. For humanitarian reasons also, I would advocate for keeping The rural and the poor in mind when making a decision to keep a receiver that otherwise makes no sense in perhaps a very urban setting where disasters are not that big of a problem, like the Chicago area where I grew up.

1: https://www.ktnnonline.com/events/

A moderately compelling argument for mandating AM radio receivers in vehicles is that AM Radio has an incumbent position in emergency broadcast of communications.

Would a small portable radio optionally powered by a vehicle's accessory port suffice? Does the AM Radio feature need to be tightly integrated with the vehicle's other systems?

Here is an example of one that retails for $11, albeit using 2x AA batteries.

https://www.amazon.com/J-166-Transistor-Excellent-Reception-...

No mention of the relevant politics? AM radio is talk radio, the home of the strongest political opinions. AM radio targets a narrow demographic: those with enough money to own a car and drive to work, but not sophisticated/rich enough to pay for streaming services. The protection of AM also rings true with the older generation who wish to slow or reverse the pace of technological change. I realize that HN attempts to avoid politics but this is a solidly partisan issue and part of the larger "culture war".

> AM radio targets a narrow demographic: those with enough money to own a car and drive to work, but not sophisticated/rich enough to pay for streaming services.

91.7% of American households have at least one vehicle. Podcasts are free?

In our area of the rural Midwest, a local AM station made a niche for themselves being the critical go to point of information during tornado, storm, flooding, and derecho warnings. Sadly as the storms keep showing up more often and more powerful, I've actual bought a couple more portable AM/FM radios spread around the house because of it.

There have been several times being in a car during those warnings that that AM station was the only reliable source of information.

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.

Why don't I ever see a headline like "Congress fights for affordable healthcare for everyone" or "Congress fights for worker's rights for everyone". They're fighting for AM radio instead.

Maybe they're not fighting for the people at all.

To keep it technical, speaking of a disaster warning system, Israel uses text messages to warn their citizens of attacks. It doesn't get more battle tested than that.

Doesn’t seem to have worked a year ago to this day.

There was a Netflix movie last year or so about an attack on the US where people outside NYC was meandering aimlessly trying to get Internet signal in their phones while NYC appeared to be under attack I they where lost without their phones. Are people that dense? All military radios support AM radio waveform I would not purchase a vehicle without AM radio support.

> Are people that dense?

did you not observe 30% of the world population's actions between 2020 and 2023?

TIL that AM radio is still a thing... But I see valid use cases listed. I dunno if it would even click in case of emergency to even try turning to AM instead of FM.

I live in Europe, own a US car Toyota Sienna and I cannot use FM radio (completely) because turns out (and I also learned it few weeks ago) that in US, only uneven channels are used (101.3, 101.5, etc). And I cannot tune it to 101.4!

National security means anti-fragile technology.

For many decades, having a radio in a car at all was an optional extra. Probably in the 1970s or so it became pretty standard. I see no issue with an automaker deciding to omit AM radios if they think customers prefer that. The market will decide. There's no reason to mandate a radio of any kind in a car.

There are road outrage/park status things still broadcast on AM

The public interest reason for mandating radios is so that drivers can receive emergency broadcasts.

Are we going to remove the power switch also to force people to have their radios on at all times in case there is an emergency broadcast?

are annoying autistic people like you going to stop making retarded posts on HN (answer to both questions: no)

In an emergency, when you have a million people evacuating a city, you can put up signs that say e.g. “tune to AM 850 for emergency broadcasts”.

To be honest I thought this part was kind of obvious and I don’t know why you made such a sarcastic comment about power buttons. Realistically speaking, every car on the market has a sound system anyway. You just need an antenna and AM radio, plus the user interface. It is not a major expense relative to the price of the car.

In an emergency, when you have a million people evacuating a city, you can put up signs that say e.g. "tune to FM 90.1 for emergency broadcasts".

We're in cities, not the middle of nowhere in this scenario. The idea that we need an AM station to cover a few hundred square miles doesn't really apply here.

> You just need an antenna and AM radio, plus the user interface

And ensure all the shielding is good enough so your AM radio is actually useful, and designing all that shielding, and potentially having to change the placement of antennas on the car, etc.

The majority of emergency radio station in the US happen to be AM stations. This is a fact.

Sure, you could phase out AM and do all your emergency broadcasts on FM. We haven’t done that. Do that first.

Here is more info about EAS: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Alert_System

There are 77 PEPs, which are commercial radio stations that double as emergency broadcast, as primary interfaces to FEMA. They are a mixture of AM and FM. You want to get rid of the AM requirement? Fine. Just switch all the broadcasts to FM first.

Sure, lets do that. FM is where most of the listeners are anyways. We can start with every AM EAS station which also transmits on FM also get their FM stations up to standards and grants to make that happen. Sounds good to me.

In the end though it still kind of sucks. We're expecting people to know about AM radio and then also bother to look around to find the right station. While stations will automatically trigger on an alert, its not like your radio is designed to listen and find these alerts and automatically alert you.

Even better with requirements for car radios, how about we require WX radio and have it set up to by default alert drivers when an alert goes through? So many cars these days are now a part of the cell networks as well, how about we require emergency alerts broadcast over cell networks?

This is from a linked article. The market doesn't come into play when it's safety infrastructure. You think if you make paying for fire and police optional everyone will pay for it? what are the consequences of not putting out the fire in one house when the neighbors do pay and the fire spreads. The market is moot when it comes to safety issues.

"AM radio plays a critical role in our public safety infrastructure. As seven former heads of FEMA have explained, AM’s resiliency combined with the long distances AM signals propagate means ‘the success of the National Public Warning System hinges on the use of AM radio.’ I agree. Americans know in times of emergency that they can turn to AM radio. I applaud Congress for its bipartisan action to ensure the continued reception of AM signals in all vehicles.”

So shouldn't it be mandated in peoples homes as well?

In emergencies people often evacuate by car, and lacking any access to emergency announcements can result in traffic jams mis-navigation, which ties up rescue personnel.

If you choose to die at home fine, but public roads are life-critical infrastructure. Guaranteeing everyone in the ensuing 'thundering herd' at least access to a basic AM/FM radio isn't too great a cost burden.

"Why do I need this radio, I don't use it" is a lot like saying, "why do I need this seatbelt, I never crash!"

Microsoft's market "decided" that I wanted to log in to a computer with a Microsoft account, not me. The car manufacturer market "decided" that everyone wanted their every trip tracked, not me. The phone duopoly market "decided" that I didn't want a headphone jack, not me.

We need to have a conversation, as a society, about how we cannot rely exclusively on complex things with many modes of failure. We need simple tools to stick around for when we hit one of those many modes of failure.

I own a robotic vacuum cleaner.

I also own a broom.

I haven't used AM radio for years. It does feel like it would die out if cars stopped including it, but this law seems like it's fighting the inevitable. I'd rather have internet access viewed as a public utility and/or better Internet privacy laws.

I have a portable AM/FM/WB radio in case of earthquakes or other disasters (it's the Wirecutter recommended one).

This regulation seems somewhat sensible but I'm not sure what the point is if it interferes with EV motors.

SF Giants are still aired on AM radio -- that's about all I use AM for these days.

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).

FM radio has not been deprecated, where did you hear that? And the infrastructure is not disappearing any time soon.

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.

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?

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.

All new cars. Buying new cars isn't as common in many places in Europe as it is in countries like the US.

According to https://www.acea.auto/figure/average-age-of-eu-vehicle-fleet..., the average age of a European car is over 12 years. It'll take another seven years for your average European car to have DAB+ support, let alone all cars.

In theory any old car can support DAB+ but car accessory manufacturers like to as ridiculous amount of money for car radios, so I doubt this change will occur faster than the car replacement rate.

DAB+ has been a complete failure so far. Its reception issues are even worse than FM and of the few people I know that have even heard of it, nobody cares. The benefactors of the DAB+ transition aren't the people listening tk the radio, but the radio stations fighting for frequency space.

if you think DAB a failure, then the "we" I meant is just unevenly distributed.

(norway and switzerland are both mountainous countries, which meant the same FM station had to maintain several different transmitters on numerous frequencies — if you're in a country flat enough to serve with vanilla sugar and hagelslag, might that have something to do with our divergent experiences?)

The average age of a Norwegian car is still 11 years (https://www.ssb.no/en/statbank/table/05528/tableViewLayout1/), not the five since DAB+ has been mandated. I don't know if Norway has a large car radio upgrading scene, but support is still far from guaranteed. Broadcasters may have switched away, but with the modern omnipresence of services like Spotify, I wouldn't be surprised if the cars not supporting DAB simply don't use their radio anymore. Based on the numbers I can find, 30% of Norwegian cars still can't receive DAB broadcasts and at the time of the switchover only a third of the cars on the road could even receive DAB transmissions. Percentages improve if you also count home radios (that's where the 97% number comes from) but it's a lot easier to install a new radio at home than it is to upgrade your car.

Furthermore, DAB transmits on an even higher frequency than FM, so mountainous areas will need more transmitters than with plain FM, not less. Sure, the combined digital streams DAB provides are used to reduce the amount of transmitter installations, but that also could've happened with FM.

DAB is far from a failure. It'll eventually replace FM by mandate, because there's an incentive for governments to let more radio stations pay for broadcasting licenses. However, it's also far from a success at the moment. Access to streaming services such a Spotify or the internet broadcasts of the radio stations themselves has probably eased the transition as well.

I haven't listened to FM, AM, DAB, or anything broadcast since I've been able to connect my phone to my car (20 years?).

Why would I listen to what the station programmers decide (and possibly riddled with ads) when I can configure my phone to play whatever I want when I want?

I’ve never used radio in my current car. Yes, I connect my phone to my car and, if I don’t have cell reception, plenty of music in my library. That’s probably pretty normal.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.)

  The Baraboo fire may have been as much a protest over the difficulty of local 
  German language courses as an expression of anti-German sentiment prevalent 
  across the nation at that time.

Are there easy German language courses?!

There were a lot more German-as-first-language Americans back then than there were later in the 20th Century due to anti-German sentiment.

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.

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.”

Nobody mentioned nor complimented the behavior of "her conservative peers." You're the one who has turned the discussion partisan.

The fact that "conservatives" are also bad on an issue doesn't make non-conservatives good or even different on an issue; that's from that weird pseudo-argument where people who passionately hate Trump mention that Trump also did some act or took some position that they're trying to defend.

It's become an argument that something is fine if the people who one claims are the evilest people in the world also think it is fine. Or that if evil people can get away with something evil, then that's unfair to the good people who have earned the opportunity to do evil? I have no idea.

Go look at where that KBJ quote (missing context and then being misinterpreted) is making the rounds: it’s from a very specific news bubble. That’s why I said “apparently in agreement with her conservative peers.” Both of those quotes were (to me) not made in good faith.

I don’t really know what you’re otherwise on about. I think you’re suggesting I’m making things far more partisan than I am. I’m just responding to the highly partisan selective quotes given.

We’ve added digital side bands to “FM” broadcast radio. We’ve fully replaced analog broadcast TV with digital. We can solve this problem, with proper planning.

Develop a digital modulation that captures human voice and degrades gracefully, fund the development of ICs to demodulate it, require AM stations to install a new modulation equipment, and gradually migrating all stations to a hybrid mode with both analog and digital transmission. All new cars must use the new version, which is far more resilient to interference. In 50 years you get to turn the analog transmissions off.

Why would you turn the analog transmission off?

Being able to pick up a station with virtually any radio ever built, or even a simple circuit you can build from spare parts in your house [1]...even if you're on the fringe edge of reception (though it might not sound great) is entire point of AM. You would be throwing all of that away.

Digital is a convenience. Analog is a lifeline.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxhole_radio

This already exists - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_Radio

Radio is important. Both in and out of a car.

Having one in a car always has it with you when you’re in the car, where a portable one might not be with you or have batteries.

I owned cars with an AM radio for 30 years. I never used it.

I've now owned cars without an AM radio for 10 years. I don't miss it.

Obviously this is just broadcasters wanting to maintain their captive audience. The “what about the apocalypse” argument is just the standard “won’t someone think of the children” misdirection. In an emergency a 120V AC inverter is far more useful equipment to have in a car than an AM radio.

Can we at least have non US radios in the EU in that case? AM is dead here, while for the US there might be a use case.

Does it matter if your car can receive some extra bands you don't use? I only use DAB in my car but it can receive AM/FM also even if i've never used that functionality.

I am surprised the a liberal senator would try protecting AM radio. AM talk radio is very right wing and it definitely contributed to the radicalization of the American right-wing. I remember when AM radio was a major boogie man for liberals.

The urge to regulate is stronger...

Why doesn't someone train AI with AM? It's mostly talk radio, and more factual than the Internet.

>It's mostly talk radio, and more factual than the Internet.

are you joking? coast to coast is worse than 4chan

Interesting read -- I appreciate their emphasis on what AM radio has mostly become ("divisive, grievance-filled infotainment") and that if Congress were to legislate AM radio as "public good", it should actually deliver a public good, not right wing corpo garbage.

Always worth following the money. Major broadcasters still using AM tend to be either sports or right-wing talk.

And what about buggy whip holders? Will no one think about the buggy whips?

> The radio industry has been fighting back, lobbying for legislation that would force carmakers to install AM radios as a matter of public interest.

Kinda stopped reading there, it's clear that this is just a desperate attempt to save a dying market for no reason.

AM radio has a strong political bent. Maybe that’s why?

The AM radio market isn’t dying at all.

Am i the only one who still mostly listens to AM radio when in the car?

cool story bro

Any time my car radio switches to AM there is major discomfort. It's time to say goodbye, and the future should be on the phone.

Any time congress gets involved many millions are spent. Again when a law is passed. Again by the manufacturers. These costs mandate the future should be supported, not the past.

Mandate that cell towers, at least along major highways, survive indefinitely on solar. A degraded service level would be acceptable, no video for example. Require satellite internet fallback! Do it now.

Any highway parking spot should have abundant charging opportunities (on solar) and drinking fountains. Prepare for the inevitable big disasters coming.

A bit of crackle and you wanna throw out AM?

No, AM is never used. So there is no station, just some loud hammering noises. The urge to get rid of that makes driving more dangerous.

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 the United States EV “success story” is now protected by 100% tariffs on competitors.

Because Tesla wants 10$ a month for Premium Connectivity.

But you can add a Carplay\Android Auto screen to most cars.

True, but why pay for the obsolete tech in the first place? A simple amplified speaker system and slot for a tablet would cost a lot less and avoid much of the obsolescence one faces with cars. Oops, the obsolescence is a key part of the profitability of automakers.

Wait, the "big 3" should have gone under in 2008, likely bought up for scraps by Toyota, etc.

Even Tesla is propped up by 100% tariffs on competition.

We have no American innovation or reason these companies should even exist. This is not capitalism. It's a big wealth transfer to the incompetent, a giant corporate welfare project we should all be ashamed of.

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