But no stations in Colorado.
I keep reading here that AM needs an external antenna to be received, but my 2006 Camry has no outside antenna but the AM (I listen to Bob Bittner’s WJIB, which plays old music and doesn’t stream) works just fine. So what’s the truth? (I assume there’s some version of an antenna, just not a thin piece of metal that kids can break off and swipe.)
That thin metal rod that kids can break off is actually just the FM antenna. To receive AM signals you need a wire loop like this.
On newer cars, often the antenna is integrated into the rear window – it’s metal trace on the window that looks like part of the defroster, but it’s actually the antenna. Or it might be very small antenna inside the “shark fin” on the roof, where the satellite radio receiver is also located. But again, that’s just the FM antenna. I’m not entirely sure where the AM antenna is. Someone on Quora mentioned the AM antenna is also a metal trace that makes a loop around the rear window, but that’s probably just newer cars (that still offer AM). Maybe on older cars it’s inside the car somewhere?
ETA: But that’s really the gist of it – that AM requires an additional antenna, not necessarily an external one.
Sure, but it’s just such a blatant case of profiteering at the cost of human life that it was the first thing that came to mind. You think things are any different today? There have been dozens of major lawsuits against automotive manufacturers in just the past few years. Just one example – unless you think a car “catching fire and exploding” isn’t a big deal:
And don’t be so sanguine about AM radios. AM stations have intrinsically longer range than FM and generally operate at higher power as well. That’s the reason CBC Radio, as Canada’s national broadcaster, operates many more AM stations, along with their FM network, than NPR does, and why they have a number of even higher-powered Clear-channel AM stations operating over wide areas on protected frequencies. Canada is a huge country that in some areas is sparsely populated, especially in the north, and the CBC Radio network – of which the long-range AM stations are an integral part – are an essential source of news and sometimes even life-saving information.
And it’s not just Canada. The US has over 4,000 AM radio stations that are an integral part of the FEMA Emergency Alert System. The National Association of Broadcasters calls AM radio “the backbone of the nation’s Emergency Alert system”.
So who’s right, those who defend AM radio as part of our essential broadcast infrastructure, or an elitist putz like Elon Musk and his fellow automakers – the ones who lobbied strongly against virtually every safety, efficiency, and environmental regulation that’s ever been introduced, because “it would increase the price of the car”.
Yes, there is such a thing as futuristic thinking. There is also such a thing as stupid thinking.
Not sure exactly what they do on the Camry, but I think the general idea revolves around two factors: (1) most radio, and even TV reception, will operate fine with an antenna that is suboptimal – sometimes extremely suboptimal – if the signal is reasonably strong, and (2) the AM radio spectrum uses much longer wavelengths than FM, so the antenna has to be effectively that much bigger. “Effectively” means some combination of an antenna length that is an appropriate fraction of the wavelength in reverse geometric progression (1/2 wavelength, 1/4, 1/8, etc) and/or a coil that has a similar effect.
The AM spectrum has a range of wavelengths between 555 and 187 meters, while FM is in the range of 2.4 to 2.8 meters. This means that the same type of antenna design will be much more compact for FM than for AM, or to put it another way, a small, compact antenna will be more optimal for FM than for AM.
Apparently both the Leaf and the Bolt have AM radios. I’ve read some owners reporting that AM works fine, others that the stations are weak. For all I know, carmakers, in their everlasting quest to save a dime, might in some cars just hook up the AM tuner to exactly the same antenna as the FM tuner. I suspect that’s just what they did in older cars with conventional whip antennas, but those things likely had more gain than the newfangled stuff where the main goal seems to be invisibility rather than performance. Just a guess, though.
Yep, when a hurricane wipes out your entire area (along with cell networks) and you are sitting in your electric car wondering which way to go to get a charge is not the time to find out you need AM/broadcast radio.
And your point about Canadaian radio is spot on as well becasue most head units (radios) are designed to be used in the US and Canada. Canada is much more spread out population wise and depends on AM radio more, something that may come back to bite Ford and the newer manufactuers in the ass when they try to expand and sell EV’s to non-high-end customers.
I’m an hour south of Los Angeles. The only way to listen to a Dodgers game is AM radio. The games are blacked out on television and there is no FM broadcast.
I know that is the conventional wisdom, but whenever I’m driving and decide I want to listen to radio out in the boonies, if FM fails me on SCAN, flipping to AM typical yields the same results, or gives me such shitty static filled crap, I quickly turn it off. This is in mountainous, or deep canyon areas.
I rarely use the radio and the only time I listen to AM is to listen to sporting events. I’ll survive if in our next vehicle AM is missing. Hell, they can remove FM as well and I won’t give a shit.
Conversely, I can’t listen to my NL team on AM, the Rockies, here in the NW.
AM radio has negative value for non-users. It requires a button or menu option that clutters the interface. It’s an extra failure point. It needs an extra antenna and slightly increases the mass of the car. It takes development effort that would be better spent polishing some other aspect of the car.
I would pay money not to have AM radio in my car (thankfully, they supplied no AM radio for free).
So it’s not just the dollar cost to be balanced against the benefits, but also the negative value imposed on non-users. Even if that negative value is small, it may be significant if the user vs. non-user ratio is high.
Maybe we can go back to having record players in cars. George Harrison and Muhammed Ali both had one.
As long as they come with Monster Cable, I can get behind this!
This is a remarkable analysis. For starters, it’s the first time I’ve seen one (1) button referred to as clutter!
I’ll take my chances on the possibility of that one (1) button falling off! 
Though I admit, if it does, it may leave me catastrophically stuck on AM or FM until the button can be found and popped back in! I will say though, that in 52 years of car ownership I have never had that happen. Although once I had a shirt button pop off, if that counts.
Not necessarily, as per what I said previously. The same antenna could potentially be used for both (as indeed was done in most cars back in the days of monopole exterior antennas). The wavelengths between AM and FM are drastically different, but antennas don’t need to be optimal and can be electrically lengthened for the AM tuner (.e.g.- with a simple loading coil).
As a rough estimate, if the antenna is a length of fine wire 5 ft long embedded in the window, it might weigh half a gram. The connecting wire might weigh as much as 10 grams. The AM tuner chip maybe 5 grams? In total that’s not quite 3/4 of an ounce. Then, of course, there is the weight of that troublesome button you mentioned – a piece of plastic weighing what, 1 or 2 grams. Let’s be generous and round up the incremental weight of the whole AM thing to a full ounce. The Tesla Model 3, which I believe is your ride, has a weight that varies depending on options but the average is just over 3700 pounds, just short of 2 tons. So your use of the word “slightly” in deeming one ounce to make a two-ton vehicle “slightly” heavier is duly noted. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to provide a quantitative value of “slightly”.
Given that car radios with the basic technology we’re talking about here have been in existence since the 1930s, it’s hard to image that any needed development – such as a good RFI filter – would be so massive that it would deplete the carmaker’s R&D budget to such an awesome extent as to stifle other projects!
I honestly don’t think Tesla thought they were doing you a valuable service when they declined to give you an AM feature on your radio. The beneficiary they had in mind was them, not you.
All I can say is “death by a thousand cuts”. Even though the costs are small, when you add them up across an array of features, they become non-negligible. Terrible interfaces like Microsoft Office get that way through a long series of “It’s just one button, Michael. What could it cost?” type decisions. As well as the reverse.
Contrary to popular belief, cost savings within competitive markets like automobiles do get passed onto the consumer. Every single thing in your car is cost optimized, and makers that don’t do so either exist in some tiny niche or go out of business. Unfortunately, the moves toward outsourcing and horizontal integration has limited the ability for many to make real cuts.
OK, I was finally curious enough. On a '17 Civic EX, the “buttons” are on the touch screen when I hit the “source” option. There are eight of them in two rows.
AM Radio, FM Radio, SiriusXM, USB
iPod, Bluetooth, Pandora, Smartphone
There are two of them that I am less likely to use than AM Radio, iPod (WTF?) and Pandora. I can access Google Play and Spotify through the Smartphone option (CarPlay in my case).
I used the AM Radio for the first time and you will all be pleased to know that it works and I will safe should the Apocalypse come and I’m stuck in a canyon in need of vital information.
In the Arthur Hailey novel Wheels, the protagonist (an auto exec) has to decide to add a $5 part to fix a potential problem. The Board refuses to do it because $5 X # of cars affected was too high a price. IIRC, it ends up killing some people.
Anything they add or subtract will affect hundreds of thousands of units, potentially. That’s a buttload of money.
Sure, not only do I agree with that, I said much the same thing upthread, but with a more cynical twist. In case you didn’t see it …
I don’t mean to nitpick and carry this argument on forever, but the problem I have with it is that it’s just a generic argument about the capitalistic virtue of optimizing costs, which could be brought to bear in support of any cost optimization whatsoever. And the problem with that is that not all such “optimizations” are good – not for the consumer, and sometimes not for anyone at all. Certainly, cost optimizations that result in cars that catch fire and explode – like the Ford Pinto of the 1970s or allegedly the 2017-2018 Chrysler Pacifica PHEV – are counterproductive.
Nothing is going to explode here but the point is that many people want AM radio in their cars – a handful in this thread, millions throughout North America. Moreover (I’m repeating something I said before) the 4000 AM radio stations in the US have been cited by the NAB as a vital part of the FEMA Emergency Alert System. The CBC in Canada operates many AM stations in addition to their primary FM network specifically for their reach, including several powerful Class A Clear-channel stations. AM is not just right-wing talk radio. Taking it away is not in the same category as changing the available upholstery material in a car’s interior.
You’re right about Microsoft Office, but it’s not relevant here. Office became bloated and ruined because Microsoft kept adding features that in many cases were mostly useless. We’re talking here about taking something away, something that many people want, and an action that some government and industry officials have criticized.
As for terrible interfaces in cars that are far too complex, we’re there already, and taking away AM radio isn’t going to do a damn thing about it. I rented a car once that had a fancy multi-purpose combined infotainment system that could show you anything and do everything. What it did for me was change the radio station to CBC Radio, and that was only after spending a great deal of time poking and swiping and tapping. And that was it. I never touched that thing again! It scared me!
And speaking of interface complexity, if you think an AM/FM toggle button is “clutter” for no good reason, how about the “Boombox” feature on the Tesla that can cause it to make arbitrary noises of your choice through its front speaker to scare pedestrians, or even better, to make a variety of fart sounds inside the car? 
This is good to know as we will need your skillset to properly rebuild society without unnecessary items or rule in the wasteland with someone who isn’t overly attached to sentimental artifacts of a broken world gone by.
Microsoft has also failed to take features away. Word still has a tab for “mailings”. While I don’t have access to Microsoft’s use data, I have a funny feeling that an utterly negligible fraction of users still use it for physical mailings. It was probably a non-negligible fraction 30 years ago, but the number of small businesses still printing out labels on their home printers has to be close to zero today. But it’s still there, taking up a top-level tab (yeah, this can be customized, but that’s yet more interface clutter).
No one’s going to disagree that that decision went the wrong way. But for every Pinto, there are tens of thousands of cases where an automaker made a change to save $10 through what they perceived to be a negligible difference in safety. They aren’t idiots, and mostly they aren’t malevolent–so the decision is actually the right one and nobody is the wiser. It never makes the media for obvious reasons.
And one can’t ignore the negative case here. What things weren’t added, that would save lives, because they would cost too much? Could a $10 tweak to the brakes have reduced accidents? Or $10 more in tire quality? Or extra crumple zone reinforcement, and so on? Nobody knows, and no one talks about it 50 years later even though these might-have-beens could have been just as significant for overall safety.
Yeah, that’s clutter and resources I’d rather them spend on something else. It’s still better than most interfaces, but definitely has room for improvement. It is customizable, at least.
Doesn’t AM require a different antenna than FM, too? I know that you can run an app on a cellphone to get FM radio (actual FM radio, not an Internet-cast or the like), using a headphone cable as an antenna, but there’s no comparable app for AM.
Broadcasters are aware of what’s happening, but they’re going to need to fight back a lot harder than this.
https://www.radiodiscussions.com/threads/“depend-on-am”-national-campaign.763751/