Is there a place for AM radio? Car companies keep dropping it like it’s hot

Sweet songs never last too long on broken radios.

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The long goodbye for AM radio looks like it’s heading into the home stretch. Makers of electric cars are increasingly ditching it because the frequency of electric engines interferes with the AM signal and creates so much static it sounds like the station you’re tuned into is on Pluto.

BMW, Mazda, Volvo, Volkswagen and Tesla have joined the growing list of automakers that have already dumped AM or plan to can it in at least some of their electric models, according to The Hill.

The latest blow, though, comes from an old friend -- Ford, a great American company that announced that it will jettison AM in all new cars, gas or electric.

Ford, the company that put the horse and buggy out of business, the creators and preservers of the F-series pickup truck, the most popular and best-selling truck in America since 1976 – a record 47 years straight, didn’t even blame electromagnetic interference when it announced the breakup.

A Ford spokesperson, trying to make nice, came off sounding a little dismissive.

“A majority of U.S. AM stations, as well as a number of countries and automakers globally, are modernizing radio by offering internet streams through mobile apps, FM, digital and satellite radio options,” company spokesperson Wes Sherwood said.

The year 1976 was the age of disco, which is as dead as Julius Caesar now. AM wasn’t even cool back then. AM hasn’t been cool since Bill Haley and the Comets were topping the charts, since families listened to Kukla, Fran and Ollie in the living room together, since Ronald Reagan was calling Chicago Cubs games, and since Jack Dempsey knocked Georges Carpentier cold, nearly killing him in the process.

But AM radio has never been as much about being cool as about being durable. It has soldiered forward into the uncertain future, reinventing itself every step of the way. And did you know that 83 million Americans still listen to AM radio, according to The Washington Post? That’s more listeners than Joe Biden got votes in the 2020 election. A heap of people.

Now, it’s just a matter of how to get to them.

Will AM ride the wave of technological change of which Sherwood spoke? Maybe cars will get so expensive nobody can afford them and everybody will have to get a horse and buggy and put a battery-powered AM radio around old Dobbin’s neck?

AM radio signals maybe can’t penetrate invisible waves created by a Tesla engine. But AM stands for amplitude modulation, and it emits a terrestrial broadcast. All you need to know about that is that an AM signal can go right through the Empire State Building, Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge, the Rocky Mountains and the redwood forests. Because of their old-time tech, AM stations can cover a huge geographic diameter depending on how high you modulate the amplitude – bigger than FM, bigger than cell phone towers, bigger than TV – especially during a power outage. AM radios still work during a power outage, and you don’t have to opt-in or remember a username and a password to tune in to, oh, the Emergency Alert System for example.

That’s why the heart of America’s Emergency Alert System is 80 strategically placed AM radio stations that can reach 90% of everybody in the country, and they’re set up so that the president can be talking to them within 10 minutes of a national emergency.

At my house, the internet goes dark approximately every time a thunderstorm rolls through the neighborhood. The electricity goes out if two birds land on the same power line. My cell phone can call my friend in Hawaii, but I can’t get my living room from my bedroom.

There’s got to be a place for AM radio. Somewhere. Somehow. Some way.