Chuck

A bunch of car makers, from what I can tell, led by Tesla, I think they were the first ones to announce this back in 2020, that they were going to discontinue AM radios in their cars.

Yeah.

And I think now you can kind of imagine why it's a politicized idea.

But the ostensible reason is that the AM stereo is interfered with by the EV.

Long story short, AM waves are much more susceptible to noise because of electrical interference.

Well, an electrical vehicle is lousy with electrical interference.

And so the whole car industry is like, we're going to have to spend a bunch of money just to keep this AM radio in there.

And the U.S.

government is pretty adamant that AM radio needs to stick around.

Again, not just for the public good thing, the nostalgia factor, but also because if you are going to get an alert that, you know, the Cubans have invaded...

you're going to probably get that alert over an AM radio station because that's what the whole system is set up to do.

Not because it's antiquated, but because AM radio does all sorts of things.

The waves can travel very far, so it reaches a lot of people.

Rural people listen to AM radio still today, like it's just part of rural life.

So everybody is reached by AM one way or another.

And I didn't know this, but you can make...

type of radio, a crystal receiver radio that can play AM radio broadcasts without any battery or power source.

The crystal manages to take the energy in the radio carrier wave and use that alone to basically reproduce the sound.

So for all those reasons, AM radio really makes a lot of sense to put all of your eggs in that basket as far as getting emergency broadcasts out.

So the government said, long story short, you need to keep AM radios in cars, and they're trying to figure out how to get that mandated.