Congress Advances Bill That Would Force Your EV To Have AM Radio

A bill just passed the House that would force automakers to put AM radio in every car sold in America—including EVs.

Photo by: Kia

By: Rob Stumpf

Sep 18, at 11:39am ET

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Congress has passed a bill that would require automaker to install AM radio from the factory in all new cars sold in the U.S.
EVs pose a challenge, though: interference.
The bill still needs to pass the senate before it becomes law.

Most Americans get into their cars and pop on a podcast or stream some music. Some may not even know that century-old AM radio is disappearing from vehicles. Well, not for long, perhaps.

Lawmakers in Congress are demanding that automakers bring the tuner back to new cars, and the House officially passed the AM Radio for Every Vehicle act this week. If adopted into law, it would force brands to equip every new vehicle sold in the U.S. with an AM tuner at no extra cost—even if those cars are electric.

You might be wondering why we even mention powertrain here.

Well, it turns out that electric motors actually cause a bit of an issue with AM radio frequencies. EVs use AC motors, and the power electronics used to turn the wheels produce enormous, rapidly switching enormous currents. That creates electromagnetic frequencies that can bleed into the same waves that AM operates on.

This creates a sound quality problem, according to automakers. Buzzing, whining, and static, for example, which can all make for an unpleasant or unusable experience for drivers. It's one of the reasons companies like Tesla have dropped the AM radio tuner from their cars. The Rivian R2 loses both FM and AM radio in favor of streaming. Mazda, Polestar, Volkswagen, BMW, and Volvo have all dropped AM radio from some EVs.

Now, manufacturers can engineer around the problem. Shielded cables, signal-to-noise filtering, or relocating hardware like antennas or receivers are all possible workarounds for automakers to consider. The problem is that all of those avenues add cost and complexity, which is why industry groups have argued against the bill. Congress, however, specifically included a line in the bill which requires AM radio to be "included in the passenger motor vehicle for no additional or separate monetary fee, payment, or surcharge, beyond the base price."

What do you think?

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Lawmakers say that AM radio is crucial to the Emergency Alert System. And even though 98% of Americans own a cell phone capable of receiving Wireless Emergency Alerts, the lack of an AM radio in cars is enough to garner 317 co-sponsors on the bill.

This doesn't mean that you brand new Rivian R2 will need to come with AM radio tomorrow. The bill still needs to pass the Senate, and then automakers will need to engineer a proper solution to account for all of that interference. Whether or not owners will ever purposefully switch on the AM tuner, though...well, that's a completely different story.