79
New electric cars won’t have AM radio. Rightwingers claim political sabotage
(www.theguardian.com)
@politics on kbin.social is a magazine to share and discuss current events news, opinion/analysis, videos, or other informative content related to politicians, politics, or policy-making at all levels of governance (federal, state, local), both domestic and international. Members of all political perspectives are welcome here, though we run a tight ship. Community guidelines and submission rules were co-created between the Mod Team and early members of @politics. Please read all community guidelines and submission rules carefully before engaging our magazine.
AM radio is still useful for public broadcast for emergencies. It offers better range, is more simple to generate, and is more resilient to intense weather that could interfere with FM or other radio frequencies.
Some of these emergencies can knock out other communication methods, so the idea of depending on phone alerts is a bit naive.
That's also assuming the emergency didn't also knock out electricity and your ability to charge your phone over many days or weeks or longer. AM/FM radios require a few batteries and can last a long time.
With that said, you can still get emergency information on many FM stations as well. There are also other radio frequency spectrum that are used for public broadcast information during emergencies. Familiarize yourself with the ones in your areas and ensure you have a way to receive those frequencies.
But ultimately I get the decision. Electric vehicles are essentially EMI (electromagnetic interference) machines. Like @debounced said in their post, dealing with this EMI is a tough problem to solve. Sure it can be solved, but the benefits really don't outweigh the effort.