AM Radio in Your Car? Don't Let Congress Decide

MSG Thomas Currie outside of my 5 years in the Navy, which, I'd consider to be closer to suburban life than anything due to where I was home-based (Whidbey), I spent all but three years living in towns of less than 10,000 people that were surrounded by farmland or in sparsely populated townships surrounded by farmland and have driven all over the US for both work and vacation over the past fifteen years. I was dodging wild turkeys, deer, farm equipment, and the occasional Amish buggy to get home and very frequently to get to customer sites. Outside of the most remote areas - where the total number of people living in those places combined account for a rounding error of total US population - I've rarely been anywhere without cell service. There is nothing special about rural areas that warrants forcing automakers and the rest of us to deal with AM radios in cars.

And by the way, if there is some national emergency that would ever result in cell networks being completely congested, they're just as likely to be congested due to the 50+ crowd posting videos and memes about the emergency being due to immigrants, trans people, "wokism", and BLM.

We're almost a quarter of the way into the 21st century. Hell, even the Amish are riding electric bikes now. It's time to ditch the Luddites.

Amn Dale Preisach - -- Odd how subscriptions have taken over your comments about AM radio because these are totally separate issues. I readily admit that I was the one who first mentioned subscriptions, but only as an example of customers NOT being able to control what big businesses do. Beyond that, there is NO relationship between a government mandate for AM radios and manufacturers demanding subscriptions for features like heated seats or GPS navigation.

But to get back to the topic of AM Radio. You said that the government should not have any say in whether or not cars have AM radios, but then you say that the government should have a say about safety features. You seem to be one of the many city dwellers who refuse to acknowledge that AM Radio is the major emergency notification system available in rural areas. Let me ask, did you protest when "the government" decided to force all new cell phones sold in the US to have an Emergency Notification System receiver built in? This is EXACTLY the same issue! If one was OK, then the other is equally OK.

PO3 Justin Bowen - OK, so now I understand your position. Rather than requiring AM radios as a safety feature, the government needs to ban AM radios because all such radios are magically contaminated by the dreaded conservative talk show disease -- which, of course, must be stamped out to make you safe from anyone else ever hearing any idea you disagree with.

MSG Thomas Currie my first take on what i texted was far from Government , this or that. At my first text, i was a bit incensed that car makers would take out options that were part and parcel of the car like the interfaces such as Apple Car Play, etc., in order to make the buyer pay for it on a monthly subscription. Radio makers once did the same thing in the beginning decades of When radio was new tech . Yes they actually wanted buyers of the Radio to pay for ongoing reception/ use of the radio. It took Government to stop this.. i think the Court was involved in this too.
Would you like to buy a radio, then have to pay to be able to use it??
Tech has now advanced to the point where microchips have replaced tubes and transistors. But still the very tech that brings this is now having to visit the same avenues that the radio manufacturers did when they first came to market.
This was the gist . That said. What the car makers do to make us pay for tech that is now considered paid for via the price of the car,, now being a pay to play item... whether for radio or what not,, is just madness. My rail against the government was part of this. That tech now has the built in option for the user to choose which channels/ EaT's ( emergency Alert Transmissions, ) they wish to listen to makes this argument obit ur Dictum . What i was upset about is having not only pay for the equipment as part of the car but also pay monthly for something that was free not 20 days before. This is capitalism gone nuts .. as well as the E AT , being up to the consumer to use or not within current available user interface as when and where they wish to listen to it or not. You can get AM channels through the interface. And to make the interface use an option to pay to use,,, we are revisiting the Radio v. Buyer problem of the Early Radio days of the past century.

Just enforce the existing federal law that makes companies responsible for the hazmat pollution of their products cradle-to-grave. See how many companies are willing to keep putting their name on electric vehicles when they know they will be responsible for the proper disposal of all those tons of lithium batteries after a few years.

People claiming that EVs are some magic solution to the environment don't seem to realize that conventional cars have a average useful life over 20 years while EV are a disposable product in just 7-10 years or less.