KGGF-AM radio tower in Coffeyville, Kansas.
Yes, you can stream AM radio stations on your smartphones and bring them into the car with you. But certainly something is being lost in the fact that automakers now are trending to take AM signals out of electric vehicles because of the engineering problems they cause.
In fact, as the EV revolution begins to eliminate the “amplitude modulation” band from new vehicles, it is messing with a free medium that has been important to America’s information and entertainment, cultural identity and even politics, especially in the heartland.
Millions of boomers grew up fidgeting with the AM dial in the evening so we could hear the strains of our favorite pop and rock music, broadcast over hundreds of miles by blowtorches such as WJR in Detroit and WGN in Chicago. Their signals get amplified in the ionosphere in the absence of sunlight and face little physical resistance from our basically flat regional topography.
Same for broadcasts of Major League Baseball teams that still often reside on AM radio. As they wiled away their summers on the lake, how many thousands of Michiganders relied on the staticky stylings of Ernie Harwell recounting Detroit Tigers games on the team’s AM-radio network, or Milwaukee Brewers fans in outstate Wisconsin reveled in hearing Bob Uecker deliver his signature home-run call: “Get up, get up, get outta here!”
Rush Limbaugh made his history-changing talk-radio audience on hundreds of AM stations across the United States. Farmers everywhere depend on weather and commodity-price data they get from AM radio. Small AM stations remain important communications cogs in thousands of communities across the heartland. Countless long-haul truckers passing through still favor the connectedness and content of AM-radio programming over FM or satellite radio. And so on.
It’s also been pointed out that obliterating the AM band this trend of AM-band also risks communications that can be crucial during weather disasters or national emergencies, so government preparedness officials aren’t happy about this for their own very practical reasons.
Late last year, in fact, for this reason, Sen. Edward Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, asked carmakers in the U.S. market to retain “free broadcast” AM radio as a “critical, reliable channel” for government officials to get their communications out.
Becauase indeed, some automakers have been excluding the AM-radio band from all-electric vehicles on the road or in development. Volvo, BMW, Tesla and others blame the particular engineering challenges of shielding the AM output in the vehicle from the powerful electromagnetic forces generated by EV propulsion systems. The Federal Communications Commission regulates requirements for a broadcast-quality signal if AM radio is included, industry officials note. The other audio systems in the car, including FM and satellite radio and internet-fed channels, don’t suffer.
It’s not just new or European brands stripping out AM. Ford, for instance, removed AM radio from the all-electric Lightning version of its iconic F-150 pickup truck. That’s despite the fact that millions of owners of the hydrocarbon-fueled versions of America’s best-selling vehicle really like AM radio and culturally represent some of the biggest aficionados of the medium.
At the same time, some other automakers have said they are, in fact, not planning to eliminate AM radio from EVs — suggesting the technological and cost challenges can be overcome. Hyundai, for example, told me it has “no current plans to discontinue AM or FM radio in future Hyundai or Genesis products.”
The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a trade group, stems in to speak for automakers on this issue. “We are in regular and ongoing communication with broadcasters and others to identify a path forward that meets the evolving needs of our shared customers while providing the high-quality products customers have come to expect from our members,” an Alliance statement said.
Of course, whatever happens to audio in EVs will take a while to dictate what Americans can listen to, given that all-electrics doubled their share of the U.S. new-vehicle market last year but still amounted to less than 6% of sales. Moreover, AM content continues to be available in vehicles through mobile phones and onboard WiFi on a streaming basis, and many AM radio stations are undertaking conversions of their signals to FM-band delivery.
“This is not an immediate existential threat to radio,” Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers, a radio trade magazine, told me. “The biggest problem facing AM transmission is the lousy sound of AM compared with everything else.”
