Your flying car will still have AM radio

A lot of abundance and growth discourse can be summed up as, “some people really don’t like change.” Case in point: the US House of Representatives has passed a measure that requires all new cars to include an AM radio, and the Senate is expected to follow suit. Now, you may be asking, “who the hell still listens to AM radio?” I remember being five or six and asking my dad about the “AM” option in our car, and him saying that AM radio was a bit older and lower-quality than FM. I am thirty-six years old, and AM radio was old-fashioned when I was a child.

AM is actually worse than old-fashioned, though; AM receivers can interfere with the electrical currents in electric vehicles, and EV manufacturers have argued that it will cost them billions of dollars to develop technology to overcome this problem and keep AM radios in cars.

But the National Association of Broadcasters, representing radio stations, is still pretty powerful, and despite the vast majority of Americans getting emergency notifications these days on their phones, the broadcasters have successfully pushed the idea that AM radio is an essential backup if the phones, FM radios, TV broadcasts, terrestrial internet, satellite radio, and all other alert mechanisms all fail.

The AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act would not be the most egregious wasteful act of overregulation the US has adopted, and it might not even be the worst this year. But it’s a great example of how short-term political considerations can lock in bad, costly policy for a long time. We could be zooming around in our self-piloted flying cars in the year 2100, and those flying cars will still, by force of law, have to have AM radios.