So people driving new Ford vehicles won't be able to get weather/emergency information in the Rockies/Sierra's (and others I'm sure) along with the vast stretches of I-70/80 (and likely more) that don't have any services for long stretches. Granted the primary user for these broadcasts are over-the-road truckers who likely have other options, but it's also handy to tune into an AM station to hear the weather and road conditions when there's no usable cell service.
I keep a Baofeng VHF/UHF radio in my car now (~$22 on Amazon) to scan around when I'm stuck in traffic. It doesn't have AM, but there are VHF weather stations[0] (and military and first responder frequencies and all that - you can see how HAM nerds get into it) if you want. In theory you can also broadcast on certain frequencies with it, but you also get into FCC licensing territory with that. Overall it seems a lot more useful than an AM radio.
This is all well and good, but my state (Washington) actively uses specific AM stations for traffic and weather alerts. You will see signs on the freeways saying "tune to 750AM for emergency weather alerts now" (or whatever the frequency is).
Also Washington and I can tell you there are a whole lot of people here in the hinterlands of the east who are regular AM listeners for weather, the sports ball games, and various other things. I know several radio station owners in the area and have to wonder if this will be the final nail in the coffin for them.
This ethos "if its important to you bring your own" is literally the opposite of user-first development. We've strayed deeply and meaningfully into premiumization and only the consumer (human beings, like us) will suffer.
If different users want different features, should the product include them all and charge each user for all the features? That also doesn't sound like user-first development.
I've not used AM in a car in decades. I'd guess Ford has looked at their customers and reached this decision based on evidence.
So it may be likely that their users prefer spending money on feature X instead of AM.
If there's a world in which emergency information is shared with the populous using AM radio, then it should be considered a bare minimum because human beings, buying the cars and selling the cars, require access to this information.
Its literally information that can lead to connection + survival as indicated by the comments below and so I'm gonna say MVP worthy until the body we say governs all of us provides a reliable alternative.
There is a reliable alternative, it's already where such items are broadcast, and more people use it than AM by orders of magnitude. Next you'll tell me we need HAM radio and Morse code.
Having AM radio is a safety feature not unlike seat-belts. In case of sever weather, thunderstorms, etc cell-phone service can be disrupted and UHF coverage is not great in rural areas. AM radio is the only way to get information in these cases. Not having AM radio by default is like making seat-belts optional.
Since 1975, seatbelts are credited with saving hundreds of thousands of lives. Try as I might, I can find zero deaths attributed to lacking AM radio in a car.
These two things are no where near alike. No one will take this line of argument seriously.
> Since 1975, seatbelts are credited with saving hundreds of thousands of lives.
It is much easier to attribute outcome of a car accident to presence or absence of seat-belts. It is much harder to determine why a certain car ended up in the path of an active hurricane or twister. So yes, comparing seat-belts to AM radios is somewhat of a stretch, indeed. But if you heed FIMA recommendations and warnings they always tell you to have AM radio handy to receive important and potentially life-saving information. You are encouraged to have battery powered AM radio at home. And if you are in the car it is no-brainier to have AM radio, preferably already built-in.
>It is much harder to determine why a certain car ended up in the path of an active hurricane or twister
Around 100 people in the US die in a twister per year, including those with AM radios, and these are extremely rarely in cars. So quite reasonably there are less than 3 people killed in cars by twisters per year, and likely zero would have been changed by AM radio or not in the car.
Around 40k people are killed in cars per year, including some with seatbelts. Around 15k lives are estimated saved by seatbelts per year.
So, you're really trying to compare on order of 0 lives saved per year in a car for AM versus 15,000? And then to invoke yet more ridiculous fear you're now throwing in twisters, which adds around, let's see, 0 deaths to the equation?
Again, making such outlandish comparisons as if they're at all equivalent will make people ignore your argument. As I now will since you seem hell bent on claiming somehow AM radio is a safety issue yet have twice made honestly innumerate arguemtns for it.
It's the exponential SKU proliferation problem. There's good reason why manufacturers like VW bundle most feature choices into a small number of trim tiers.
The opposite of user-first development sounds pretty good then. Finally, cars built according to how an automaker wants instead of as a checklist of things to attract as many customer dollars as possible.
AM radio is a niche use case. I've never used AM radio in my life. User first development means that you need to include every niche feature a user may want.
I’ve never used a wheelchair ramp but don’t mind that buildings that I use have them.
This move is just laziness by automotive manufacturers not wanting to address their negative externalities (spewing RF into the local environment), disguised as efficiency/progress.
Phones (carplay / android auto) have replaced this. Google maps can show a much better picture of the current traffic conditions than a radio broadcast.
That's great when you never leave a 10 square mile bubble in the Bay Area.
There's a > 40 mile stretch of state route 542 (mt baker highway) in WA where there is no cell signal. Zip. Nada. No matter the carrier. And this road can carry nasty rapidly changing weather conditions in the winter. Your iPhone 26 will continue to proudly display "No Service." So, no, it has not replaced this.
iPhone 14 has satellite connectivity for emergencies, other handset makers are doing this too. in 10 years the picture will look much different, and i doubt any phone will ever have truly “no service” again.
T-mobile's claim is that by 2024 their customers will get emergency satellite connectivity on their existing handsets, even cheap $200 ones. They might need to be new $200 handsets in order to get the software support, but the hardware support is supposedly there already. The specific language T-mobile uses is the "vast majority of smartphones already on T‑Mobile’s network" which sure sounds like it includes $200 phones. With the help of Starlink, T-mobile is going to put cellphone towers in space, pointed down, and your existing cellphone will be able to pick up the signal and the satellites will be sensitive enough to hear the cellphone's transmissions.
T-mobile's service will be limited to various forms of texting and possibly also Twitter, which is used by many emergency departments to broadcast information, which is slightly different than the iPhone's offering of dire emergency service coverage. Still doesn't replace AM radio use cases though.
Satellite connectivity for emergencies will be just that, for emergencies. Technology will have to progress greatly (which, 10 years could do it) before "for emergencies" will include "you get data connectivity to tell you details of the road conditions" like you're imagining. In the interim, AM radios are still necessary.
Google insisted on showing roads continuing to be closed well after e.g. CalTrans issued a statement otherwise and reopened them, after the last bout of winter storms in early March.
The response time to displaying or ending closures related to wrecks on less well traveled roads is abysmal as well.
But it's a feature that comes in quite handy, for only a few dollars of manufacturing cost. I tune to road status AM radio all the time when driving over the mountains
There are a bunch of example replies about how AM is used as a direct life safety device and you and others seem to keep simping for a corp’s ability to profit.
Literally choosing profit over people.
AM is not replaced by FM, Cell, wifi, iphone 14 sat emerg use… it’s a device that also states use in service to the citizens.
It should be mandatory due to the nature of Khz bandwith signal propagation over the Mhz fm band.
Ford already made the decision for you. If you need an AM radio, bring your own. They are about $10 on Amazon. Most people don’t need it. As a bonus, you can take an AM radio with you as opposed to leaving it in your car, so when you have to run away and hide under some bridge to escape a tornado you could have the radio with you.
Right. I get that. I think it’s a misguided decision. But I get it. Because I understand that profit is their only driving motivation (no pun intended).
What I don’t grok is how many replies there are here quite literally picking on those people who demonstrate legitimate life safety uses for the AM band, Some of those by the State providing a service.
Yes, do not buy this if you decide you need AM as a backup. I get that.
Heck, I already won’t buy cars that can be disabled remotely. “Old man yells at cloud” memes aside.
Just because a company’s motivations don’t match what a niche customer wants, doesn’t mean their only motivation is profit. They certainly have other motivations beyond profit, just none that you may care about. Consider the Ford Bronco, where one of the motivations was to beat the Wrangler. Given their engineering decisions, profit was certainly not the only motivation.
On the contrary, corporations are nothing but humans. Thousands of humans working together to achieve human goals. And if what humans mostly want is profit, then corporations will want profit, but occasionally they want other things too. Power, revenge, prestige.
You’re applying human emotion to the actions of humans within a corporation and sure, that tracks.
From a purely mathematical shareholder ROI standpoint, a “continuous expansion” facet of capitalism, and the purchase of labor from humans who do not themselves own or control the corporate decisions - there is only ever ROI that is considered.
What's interesting about this is that the cost of an AM radio is essentially nothing, Ford owners (specifically trucks) are often very conservative which includes their views on truck design (see past Ford updates and reporting), and often rural - so exactly the people who are most likely to use AM radio. So Ford must either be clueless in alienating their customers or believe that the tradeoffs are worth this move.
Or buy an old car. Since it appears to be impossible to buy new cars that don't phone home or have those horrific touch screen console displays, this is what I expect I'll be doing for the rest of my life.
Chains and tires are something you use over time and replace so they can't be built-in. In this case anyway, because special purpose vehicles do come with deep track tires by default.
On other roads you also want to not have chains or snow tires. You never want to not have AM radio - it doesn't matter if you don't use it and it's basically free given the car cost.
Many of the rural areas in my state still use AM radio, schools, community centers, small towns, and the farming migrant workers. The talk channels that report on the schools and community are AM based, not FM.
But I've switched to streaming the AM/FM, but having the AM radio is still used.
No real reason to drop AM except as a cost cutting feature, filters already exist for EV cars, and aftermarket radios work with AM without issue proving Ford is a liar.
I still buy phones with sdcard and headphone jack, at least cars I can upgrade the radio. But why buy a new car if its crippled and marked up, better buy used at this point.
Complete tangent, but why don't they put simple AM radio receivers (or even low power transmitters) in cell phones? Imagine the cool stuff you could do with an AM radio API!
I recall an HN thread in which it was claimed that in fact most phones can, but to enable it means more FCC certifications etc. Can't find it offhand; someone more knowledgeble should jump in. (I'd love such a feature myself.)
Yeah that's so cool. I mean Bluetooth was crap back then, if it was even a thing at all. Only way you could listen to music on your existing home / car stereo without any wires.
I wonder how many cents this will save them per car. When I can buy a Software Defined Radio module for less than a bottle of wine and some sushi that lets me listen to both AM and FM (everything below 1 GHz basically), and this module takes up less space than my smartphone, it can't be because AM radio is particularly hard to install or expensive to produce.
Seems pointless to remove, but at the same time I bet the majority of car owners these days don't really use AM that often, if they even know what it is, that is.
AM is hard to implement in EVs due to shielding requirements. Not just about being cheap, about deprecating the obsolete.
From the AM broadcasting Wikipedia page:
“Among persons aged 12-24, AM accounts for only 4% of listening, while FM accounts for 96%. Among persons aged 25-34, AM accounts for only 9% of listening, while FM accounts for 91%. The median age of listeners to the AM band is 57 years old, a full generation older than the median age of FM listeners."
Many farming communities only have AM radio for the migrant workers. So Tesla/Ford might actually be cutting off low income, non english speaking farming immigrants from access to local radio in their own language and community.
But they they probably are not driving EVs like tesla, still not cool thou.
Ford cutting it out of their f150 work trucks seems to be rather bad for many communities.
GMRS radios also barely with within an EV vehicle surprisingly. Was only a few car lengths behind friend on a road trip, couldn't talk to them over GMRS radio, but I could pick up truck and boat traffic from miles away! We had to go back to using our phones to coordinate pitstops!
Those usage numbers are actually higher than I expected, but maybe that is because they are framed in relation to FM and usage of FM is way down in those demos too.
New combustion vehicle sales are being phased out in many jurisdictions by 2030-2035. Might as well drop this now for supply chain and shared platform efficiencies considering how fast use is trailing off.
They force supply chains to reconfigure regardless of public opinion. If legacy auto continues to build combustion vehicles they can’t sell, it’s a death sentence. They already have a debt load exceeding safety while trying to move to EV production at scale.
But sure, ignore nation state regulations as a multinational at your own peril. Not my debt to service in a rising interest rate environment.
You can't push demand down people's throats even if they are receptive to EVs. Where are renters going to plug in their state mandated vehicles? Homeowners who don't have a secure place to plug in? People who can't afford electrical upgrades? Sucks to be them, go ride a bus?
Used car prices are already skyrocketing. And with all the manufacturers having already stopped making their cheaper cars, it's only going to get worse. Add in forced EV adoption, and demand for used cars will go up even higher.
There is a gas-user density threshold below which stations stop being viable. It will be interesting seeing the map of gas-station deserts develop and expand over the coming decades.
As a daily driver of hydrogen fuel cell vehicle I experience that today, if I can manage with just 45 pumps in all of California some constantly broken down, and still do 15,000 miles/year it should be fine even if many pumps disappear.
Gas stations may become primarily supercharger points, and pump maybe in one corner as a legacy, i doubt it would completely disappear as long as old vehicles still ply the roads in numbers.
From public transit to government subsidy for people economically unable to make the change there are many policies we can effect to solve this problem. Indirect subsidy of Gas[1] should not be one of them
[1] Without a carbon tax on emissions we are all already effectively subsidizing the costs of climate related economic impact of floods, droughts, forest fires so on.
The Japanese and Germans are resisting the ICE phase out in their own ways. The Germans aren't ready to walk away from their vaunted automotive history so they forced efuels to be acceptable for 2035. But all those efuel vehicles will run hydrocarbon petrol just fine. Toyota and Honda are both dragging their feet on ICE retirement. Toyota has said they have no plans to give up ICE production, even after the recent CEO change. Honda is quieter but they both sell into markets that aren't going to stop wanting ICEs: they can't afford BEVs.
My Honda did… I was pre signed up for my convenience. and apparently they gave XM my address too because I started getting regular mail when the trial ran out..
I wonder if it's less cost and more about a support angle.
If they get a mere handful of customers tying up service people on "the AM radio was crystal clear on my 1992 Camry with manual-everything, it must be my new $60k electric car being busted!" it's probably more costly than telling the software developers to deselect a build flag.
I thought about that too. An external or internal socketed module would turn an AM UPGRADE into at least $100 in labor costs unless it's done by the RADIO OEM. Just put AM in the darn radio guys!
As a long-time Ford customer and fan of AM radio this annoys me greatly. My current radio died and I've been using phone apps and it isn't a very pleasant experience. The apps are horrible, you have to listen to two minutes of commercials before hearing the station and then they crash often even on wi-fi forcing you to listen to the commercials all over again.
I know that Tesla has never had AM radio in their cars. But both GM and Chrysler have developed filtering for their EV's and have announced they will not be dropping AM radio.
That’s the way things seem to be going in cars. The simple and uncomplicated analog systems of the past are being replaced with more complicated electronic versions. The benefits are there but they come along with new fail modes that are harder to fix.
Except it’s false. My Model S plays AM radio just fine.
Edit: my Model S is a 2013, and apparently they’ve been phasing out AM on new cars since 2018 or so. The original point (that Tesla never used it) is still wrong tho.
I don't get this at all. What was wrong with a simple mechanical latch with a mechanical key? It doesn't need power, there's little to break, and little to understand.
There's so much absolute garbage getting thrown on these cars, like electric/electronic emergency brakes. Who in their right mind thinks this is a good idea?
The exact same vehicle sold through a commercial contract will include AM. So this is really just trying to force people to pay to stream the internet feed of all of these radio stations.
Jim Farley is going off the deep end. If he’s not careful the Ford family is going to can him, and he can live in a van down by the river, with no AM radio in it.
They could drop everything if they brought back the double DIN slot. Such a simple solution but it doesn't jive with the times. We really can't have nice compatibility anymore.
My '23 EV gets its time from GPS but for some blasted reason, doesn't account for daylight savings. I have to toggle the "daylight savings" clock setting twice a year.
Certainly for a while. I am also in the Pacific Northwest (US side) and we too have these stations but the signs on the freeway flash lights when the stations are giving _emergency_ information -- think floods, rockslides, avalanches...
I think Norway already turned their analog radio network of (so AM and FM) in favour of digital. So the answer would be the same in both cases: the broadcaster has to update to newer technology to keep listeners.
Considering how much of their sales are pickups, which are used in rural and mid sized cities, it will be interesting to see how much impact there is, or if there's another reasonable way to tie in AM. AM goes very long distances and this makes driving a Ford a much smaller world.
I wonder if there is a large difference in audience. Pickups are kind of just minivans for today’s smaller families, with a little different cultural associations. Large cities are packed full of them.
The long distance of AM is nice for high school sports. Every now and then I try to tune a little high school football in on the car radio, and it’s niche enough programming that it’s not as if I can change to a different station carrying it when I go out of range. Even pro sports I prefer AM for, who knows why.
Genuine question: why isn’t traffic info/emergency broadcast moved to FM in North America? Is it mostly tradition/inertia in the use of FM, or also technical such as long distances being somewhat cheaper to cover? I’m not sure if a car I have owned has AM or whether there are any stations on there. The modes I can switch between are called “FM” and “Bluetooth” (but I’m sure the same model would have AM in NA).
It's no bigger than Europe and individual states correspond quite well to a European state in terms of density and population. So size and density alone doesn't really explain all the differences between Europe and the US, nor in this case.
For the sparser areas one can easily compare the northern half of Sweden to e.g. Idaho (northern half of Sweden has the same area as Idaho but half the population at 1M). There is FM coverage behind every tree. Don't ask me what the cost difference would be if that had been solved with one big AM transmitter instead of dozens of FM transmitters. But at least the emergency broadcasts will be stereo.
My very first electronics project as a child was making a crystal radio with my dad. The wonder of being able to listen to AM stations with no power!
Vale AM!
When I read the story about GM dropping CarPlay, I thought to myself that it’s just the beginning. All or most manufacturers are going to pull crap like that - all that indignant postering about never buying a GM will be in vein. Soon it’ll be: “I’m never buying GM, Ford, Toyota, Chevrolet…”
No idea how widespread AM is across the pond but during the 23 years I have spent living in Poland, never have I listened to an AM radio station and trust me, I even intentionally tried to find such stations.
In the US the car manufacturers learned that they can increase their profits by selling more expensive cars to fewer wealthy customers. The average Joe will most likely never be able to afford a new car again.
It wouldn't remotely surprise me if we don't see a lot of late 90's to mid 2000's vehicles getting run and rebuilt for a long time, kind of like Cuba. Barring perhaps the crashworthiness, for areas with no rust, it's kind of amazing to see how many older GM trucks of that era are still running down the road (I know I've got a couple myself).
It's hard to imagine ponying up many tens of thousands of dollars for a new truck, when they don't really do anything better (or are often worse) than what you have, and the cost of overhauling an older truck still comes out pretty favorably. I wonder if GM is cursing how easy and well understood it is to rebuild and improve a 4L60E or a small block chevy?
Most are barely getting by. Most can't afford sudden major emergencies (car breakdowns, medical expenses, accidents, etc.) and most are living paycheck to paycheck.
I'm sure they are going to keep the spying onstar module and its anthenna. Unlike AM radio, onstar has no use to the driver, but it has so many uses for everyone else.
Serving a ~100 mile radius with a 5kW antenna is not "large amounts of energy." That's about how much a single cell tower uses, and those outnumber AM towers by several orders of magnitude.
There is a similar license for low power FM, but has slightly different licensing requirements that makes FM less suitable. But even if those requirements were waived, I suspect that new cars without AM radio will be in the road well before state DOTs procure FM equipment and cut over.
My boomer father, who drives Fords pretty much exclusively, loves to tell me how bad it is that the Tesla I drive doesn't have AM radio. Meanwhile, I didn't even notice and couldn't care less.
I think the discussion here is missing something. The issue isn't "shielding" the radio. Modern power electronics, including Hybrid/EV drivetrains and modern electronic transmissions, produce in-band interference for broadcast AM. If you shield the radio, you're blocking the _signal_, as well as the noise. The only solution is to shield the power system (including the drive motor). This can add significant cost in both engineering and production, and interfere with thermal management (gaps let out hot air and RF!). Of course, with enough effort, anything can be shielded, but most EMI emissions masks I work with only go down to 30Mhz! Single MHz is below the range of "RF" and within the range of "Power Electronics" in the minds of modern engineers.
The real issue here is that while FM made the switch to hybrid Analog+Digital, AM is still living in the past. The technology has not changed in literally a century. The FCC has authorized hybrid AM operation, but there hasn't been any real adoption. We have 100 years of signal processing magic, and it would be so much cheaper for car manufacturers to include a single chip than to properly shield drivetrains just for AM radio backwards compatibility.
We should have spread-spectrum orthogonal-multiplexed radio beamed to the entire country from space. 100 geo-coded channels, and your car automatically plays the one for the region you're in. Adapt or die, but the high power future isn't going to wait up for AM.
ICE engines have been try to pollute AM bands since forever with their ignitions and other high voltage discharge systems -- that's why they're usually fairly shielded.
HID headlights created huge interference problems on the earliest cars to equip them -- now they're shielded.
The early Prius model owners could famously tell when the ICE engine was about to begin operating due to the ICE ignition system beginning charge and causing AM interference, which then became much more pronounced upon activation and ignition discharge.
I guess my point is that these were all tremendously noisy sources that got remediated -- I worry for the RF noise floor across the board when companies are no longer incentivized to chase such gremlins.
What good would digital AM do here? Instead of an analog channel filled with engine noise you'd have a bitstream with a high error rate. Neither one is letting your signal through.
And 100 channels? There are 4484 AM licenses in the US, 6686 FM commercial, and 4207 FM non-commercial. (https://www.fcc.gov/media/broadcast-station-totals) That would completely eliminate the last struggling bit of local media ownership.
