Design engineers are caught between a push to drop AM radios from cars and the radio industry’s pushback.
It hasn’t received much attention among all the other news (mostly bad, some good), but there’s some momentum in the U.S. Congress to mandate the inclusion of AM radio receivers in cars. Among all the other issues with which Congress is grappling (make your own list here), this may seem like a fairly small issue, but it is not to the key players and has major costs, consequences, and implications.
Who are the players? On one side, it’s the AM radio broadcasters who fear that they will lose a significant fraction of their audience if AM in cars disappears – apparently, that’s a major listening venue for their audience. On the other side, vehicle makers are challenged by the cost and design effort to make AM radio receiver performance acceptable in today’s…
