I have driven over 700,000 miles in the last 35 years and have never used the AM radio in any of my cars.
Even 25-30 years ago when I was logging up to 1000 miles a week across the Great Plains states, I never listened to AM. The only thing on AM was religious and/or crank political programming.
I buy cheap, old cars, so I usually have AM, FM… and cassette. AM has never sounded any good, so I don’t listen to it.
One time, I replaced my radio with a Bluetooth/CD/FM unit, but only because I had a long road trip coming up. I haven’t upgraded my current ride (my mom’s old Olds; at 13mpg, I’m mostly riding my bike).
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Did you listen to them today? 10-1 win over the Red Sox!
What about the KIRO app on the phone? In fact, I bet if someone had that app and a VPN to make it look like they were in Seattle …
I had a car that still had the am - 8 track tape player in it =) [1974 Opel 1900 2 door sedan in powder blue. This was in 2012] No tapes, but if I had some I could have played them =)
I can’t find MLB on Sirius XM anymore. When it was available, it was a royal pain, as they shuffled the stations every day, and you had to scroll through about a dozen stations to find your game. I tried streaming the Mariners, but the local sports station streams everything except the Mariners, due to some MLB rule. So, I’d probably have to get an MLB app or something. What actually happens is I miss out on the game and watch it on DVR when I get home.
Because the incremental cost is almost zero to provide a traditional service to the millions of people who DO use it. In the US, NPR has a handful of AM stations; in Canada, CBC Radio has many, some of them operating at high power on reserved Class A Clear-channel frequencies that gives them a long range.
AM is also the traditional home of specialty niche broadcasting. Though a lot of it, like “talk radio”, is religious and political claptrap, there are also sports radio stations and specialty music and information stations. Do you think “almost no one” listens to any of this?
There isn’t room for everyone on the FM spectrum, and many people don’t have access to fancy-pants stuff like satellite radio and cellular internet. Even if they did, you’d be asking these folks to pay hundreds of dollars for a device that might pose an incremental cost of a dollar to car manufacturers, with no guarantee that they’d get what they want anyway since many AM stations would just go out of business.
My high school/college car was a 1976 Datsun that I “stole” from my mother (she let me use it more and more, and eventually I took it with me, lol). It had only an AM radio installed. I bought a radio/cassette player so I could have some actual FM music to listen to, but there was no space in that B210 dashboard where it would fit - the space where the radio was was incredibly tight.
So I attached it under the glove compartment on the passenger side, using Erector set pieces. Worked like a charm.
It’s a paid add-on now to get MLB games on Sirius XM, which is crappy. I loved being able to switch around between games when I was in my car driving around.
Channel 89, the MLB Network channel, will often have a game on, but you’re stuck with the game they choose.
MLB does seem firmly attached to the idea that making their product hard to find will increase the demand for it (I guess like Coors when it wasn’t available east of the Mississippi (or whatever that rule was)). I used to watch an occasional Royals game on TV, but have no idea where to find them now (actually, I think it is Bally Sports, but that isn’t part of my streaming package).
You need the Platinum tier of service to get the sports play by play stations (and Howard Stern).
Your logic is that it’s greed even though the incremental cost is zero?
This. AM is still a vital service in many areas of the country and for many constituencies, who otherwise would have no radio to serve them at all. Just because I don’t use it doesn’t mean that nobody does.
The availability of low-powered FM translators offered help to many small AM broadcasters, but not everyone could get one and the window to apply happens infrequently. And a lot of these frequencies were sucked-up by the major broadcasters in order to simulcast their HD2 and HD3 FM stations, effectively giving these companies more FM stations and doing nothing to assist small broadcasters. (“Here, you already control most of the full-powered FM frequencies in your town. Let’s give you a few more.”)
Having spent 18 years of my broadcasting career on AM, my thoughts on the demise of AM could fill a book. I heard it happening in real time, thanks to poorly-manufactured car radios that barely sounded better than a telephone (and a lack of manufacturing standards) and the FCC’s inability to do anything about it.
I found a device on Amazon for $29.
If millions do listen, and I don’t totally dispute that, AM stations won’t go out of business because of car radios not coming standard with AM
That’s easy to state, but doesn’t neccessaily make it true. As much as half of the people who listen to AM radio listen to it in their cars. So taking it out of cars is a significant hit to an industry with a very limited amount of listeners.
As for cost, true it only cost pennies to have an AM tuner included along with an FM tuning in your vehicle, but thats not nearly the only cost. The AM radio requires an antenna external to the vehicle and is often packaged with other antennas such as FM and Sat Radio. If you remove sat radio and have it provided as a celluar service (which 90% of users can recieve) and then put the FM antenna in the glass you are then left with only an AM radio that requires an antenna. Then its easier to justify getting rid of AM due to the cost of the antenna. Also with an electric vehicle there is an extra filter required to make AM work (such as in the Nissan Leaf), which add significant cost.
In short, the car makers are looking at improved styling by having no radio antennas and extra profit by having people pay for services such as Sat radio. While doing away with the cost for antennas and filters. So greed is part of the equation.
But there is a literal blind spot in this line of thinking, not everyone can get these services via celluar signals. People who live out west near mountain ranges or where cell service is spotty would be left with no service options. You actually need Sat signal in these areas and AM is the only broadcast signals many can recieve on a consistant basis. It may only be 5-10% of the total population, but that adds up to a lot of people who will be left with no options.
I note that Tesla doesn’t have SXM in their vehicles, but they do have it as an option. The option being to add an aftermarket antenna kit to your Tesla, like people did in the late 90’s to add SAT radio to their vehicles when it first came out. It may come down to that for AM, if you want or need AM or SAT radio you may have to add a stick on atenna to your car. But what upscale owner wants to do that?
A few things here. I’m not the one who said it was “greed”. I also didn’t say the incremental cost was “zero”. We’d have a more productive conversation if you weren’t so intent on finding “gotchas”. I was responding to your baseless claim that “almost no one uses [AM radio]”. Which as I and others have indicated, is manifestly not true. What you really meant to say is “I don’t listen to AM radio and neither do my friends, therefore I declare it useless without knowing anything about it”.
Back to the subject of greed, because now I will say that yes, it is a factor in a way that makes it true even if the incremental cost is just a dollar, although as others have said, the cost of a potentially different or separate antenna or an RFI filter for electric cars raises the cost. But it’s the nature of the automotive industry that because of its high volume and the fact that there are so many components in a car, they nickel-and-dime their suppliers down to the last fraction of a cent.
So, a lesson in greed: something that might add as little as a dime to the cost of a component and therefore the cost of making a car is something that is going to be looked at, whether by a greedy bean-counter or by a design executive catering to greedy bean-counters, and it’s going to be looked at with no regard to its utility or even (as in the case of cost-cutting on the Ford Pinto) its impact on safety. It’s only about running the numbers and seeing what nets the most profit. If they make more money but have to lose a few customers, then so be it, whether those customers are lost to another car company or die in one of their death traps – they don’t care. Ford paid out $127.8 million (about $620 million in today’s dollars) for knowingly selling an unsafe car that killed people, in order to save a few bucks in manufacturing costs.
Cost-reducing for better margins (greed) or lower-costs are two sides of the same coin. The goal of the 10¢ saved in one place may be to fund a new feature elsewhere.
The EV car’s usage metrics might already show AM use is low enough to drop it. In that case, there would be no reason to charge users for it.
Talk about gotchas…c’mon dude. The Ford Pinto fiasco was over 40 years ago and no one is getting fried to death from a lack of AM radio. Your claim that it would cost hundreds of dollars for a user versus a dollar for the car manufacturer is totally unfounded. The latest model of Civic has an AM radio on all of their cars. I am not going to bother to do an exhaustive check but I bet that nearly all economy cars have them and it’s the fancier cars that don’t and those who buy fancy cars can afford a smart phone or an after market AM radio.
The idea that manufacturers cut corners for profit is stereotypical.
I agree that sometimes they are trying to keep prices down. For example the shrinking Hershey bar. The price stayed the same for a long time because the size was slightly reduced.
Removing AM is a trivial savings for auto makers. Maybe it was primarily a design driven decision. But they shouldn’t ignore the population that doesn’t have good FM reception and can’t afford satellite radio.
I didn’t realize the quality of AM car audio has degraded. Reading this thread has been informative.
Satellite radio is $60/year if you call and ask for the discount*, you can get a cheapie smartphone for around $60 and, as I mentioned, you can get an aftermarket AM radio for $30.
*you may have to pay more for the car with satellite capability though.
Mariners games are broadcast on 20 other stations in Washington besides KIRO plus stations in Idaho, Montana, British Columbia, Oregon and Alaska. I listened to a couple games on a Bellingham station last year while camping near Burlington. They also have a Spanish language feed of their home games.