EV and AM
President Trump’s executive order this week rolling back electric vehicle mandates and deadlines is seen by many as a positive thing. Folks who are fans of AM radio look to this as a victory, because the interference from electric vehicles affected AM radio reception in cars.
That’s ostensibly why EV makers started dropping AM radios from their vehicles, because it would be too costly to provide enough insulation to allow the AM signal to be heard. I said “ostensibly”—and I’ll get back to that in a moment. But that was the trigger for what ultimately became the “AM in Every Vehicle Act,” legislation in Congress to require automakers to include AM radio in the name of public safety due to its role in the Emergency Activation System. The act had support, but was not brought up for a vote in the last Congress.
But with no mandates for EVs, and with EV makers finding appropriate and inexpensive ways to insulate from interference, one might think the fight for AM radio is over. Guess again.
Some had suggested this was a way for the left to silence right-leaning talk radio, which is predominantly on the AM band…but I think that was an incidental point.
As with so many other things, this was all about money. If they get rid of AM radios, soon the automakers will dump FM radios, because they would claim the cost involved to only have one of the two bands would not make sense—even though they caused the problem by dumping AM.
So what happens when you don’t have a radio for free programming in your car? You’ll be more likely to purchase the services that are in partnership with the automaker in question…satellite radio, streaming radio, etc. Why would you pay for their programming if you could get what you wanted for free?
In the end, then, the whole “dropping AM radio from cars” issue was a multi-step ploy by big companies to force you to pay for services you now get for free. And that’s why the “AM in Every Vehicle Act” remains important, even if the EV mandate is gone.
Because it was never really about EVs anyway.
