AM Radio Must Die
Tune In, Drive Off
There is a super weird conversation happening in the US about AM radio.
Congress is seriously considering mandating that all new cars have AM radios.
I spent the weekend reading articles about why some folks consider AM radio to be essential, irreplaceable, and practically a constitutional right (assuming your country still respects something you call a constitution).
There’s a common set of refrains arguing for making AM radios mandatory.
The audience: There are eighty million AM radio listeners.
The crisis: AM radio is critical infrastructure for emergency alerts.
The farmers: But what about the farmers! How will they get their farm news?!
FEMA: In the US, AM radio has been the backbone of FEMA’s emergency response communications plan.
Sure, maybe all of that is true.
But I still think it’s time to rip those static-infested signals right out of our vehicles’ dashboards.
Signal Versus Noise
AM radio is woven into the US Emergency Alert System.
But in October 2023, FEMA ran a nationwide emergency alert test.
The kind of real-world scenario that AM mandate supporters claim makes this service essential.
According to a CTA survey cited in the Congressional Research Service report on this legislation, 95% of Americans received that alert on their (wait for it) phones.
Only one percent received it over AM radio.
One percent!
That number doesn’t appear in the National Association of Broadcasters’ press releases.
It should be the first line of every congressional hearing on this topic.
The Emergency Alert System was designed in 1994. The World Wide Web had barely been born, the first BlackBerry devices would launch five years later, and we were another decade and a bit away from the iPhone.
Yet the system meant to reach every American in a national emergency still relies on transmitters, towers, and underlying technology built in the mid-20th century, because modernizing it was never seen as a priority.
Mandating AM tuners in cars doesn’t fix that.
The FEMA Paradox
According to an Associated Press analysis published by PBS, the Donald has approved 80% of disaster requests from Republican governors but only 60% from Democratic governors.
He’s taking longer than any president since 1989 to approve FEMA aid.
FEMA has had four acting directors since January 2025. #chaos
A Trump-appointed council is actively recommending changes that would shift disaster costs to states and reduce the number of federal declarations.
The agency that is supposed to coordinate emergency response through those AM transmitters is being radically restructured and, in some corners of the administration, discussed as a candidate for complete elimination.
Building a public safety argument on FEMA’s reliability in 2026 is absurd.
The institution on which the AM mandate depends is dying (or being killed).
Eighty Million? Let’s Get Real.
Maybe eighty million Americans do listen to AM radio each month.
Maybe.
That sounds enormous until you realize it’s the same figure being cited to defend a technology that reached peak usage before the dawn of colour television.
Spotify has an estimated 100 million users in the US.
TikTok has 183 million monthly active users in the US.
YouTube reaches 259 million Americans every month.
Sure, AM radio’s audience is big and real. But many other media have a broader reach.
It is also aging, shrinking, and increasingly concentrated in demographics and geographies that have been underserved by broadband investment.
That’s not an argument for keeping AM radio in cars.
That’s an argument for expanding rural broadband.
What’s The Rush, Bro?
So Many Cars
There are about 297 million vehicles on US roads today.
The average age of those vehicles is more than 12 years.
Ninety-nine percent of those vehicles were sold with analog AM radios on board.
Even if every single automaker stopped including AM radios tomorrow, it would take more than 30 years for the fleet to turn over and for AM to disappear from the road fully.
Thirty years!
A handful of manufacturers, including Tesla, Rivian, and BMW, have announced plans to remove it from some models.
The crisis being legislated against is, at best, a slow-moving transition that won’t be completed until 2056.
The bipartisan sprint to pass a mandate before the end of this year demands more clarity.
This isn’t a public safety bill.
It’s a revenue-protection bill for a legacy, advertising-supported broadcast industry watching its in-car audience erode.
Safety… Say What Now?
John Bozzella, CEO of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee that this mandate creates a troubling precedent at NHTSA.
NHTSA exists to mandate vehicle safety technology.
Airbags.
Anti-lock brakes.
Electronic stability control.
Seatbelts.
All of those went through careful study, cost-benefit analysis, and formal rulemaking. None of that process is happening here.
Congress is opening the door for NHTSA to mandate vehicle equipment unrelated to crash safety.
You might like the AM radio mandate today.
The next Congress, with different priorities, now has the same authority to mandate something you like a lot less.
IMHO
FirstNet Expansion
I’m not rooting for AM radio to die because I don’t care about emergency alerts, rural communities, or broadcasters.
I’m rooting for AM radio to die in cars because its absence would force us to address other problems and modernize legacy communication infrastructure.
The FirstNet broadband network, built specifically for first responders, already covers 99% of the US population. It is purpose-built to prioritize emergency traffic when commercial networks are congested.
The FCC’s expanded WEA system can geotarget alerts to within a tenth of a mile.
The FEMA IPAWS program is actively integrating new alerts into systems outside of broadcast AM radio.
Maybe those are the things we should care about and fund better.
A commitment to rural broadband, expansion of satellite internet, a 21st-century emergency alert system, and mobile network emergency systems built for network stress would do more for the 80 million AM listeners in the US than any law requiring an AM tuner in a Tesla.
We have decades before AM radio disappears from the road.
That’s enough time to build something better.
And if you really need a new AM radio, go buy one on Amazon, you luddite.