EVs didn't kill the radio star — you did

Tune into the latest woke energy transition conspiracy — if you can. Sean Hannity, one of Fox News’ more prominent audience respecters, has noticed something missing from a lot of electric vehicles. Not the engine, but AM radio. Naturally, this isn’t just a case of frequencies being cancelled but conservatives too.

This would be a direct hit politically on conservative talk radio in particular, which is what most people go to AM radio to listen to.

Context? If we must. A number of carmakers — including Tesla, Ford and BMW — have dropped, or soon will drop, AM radio service from various EV models. Their rationale is the electric motors interfere too much with AM frequencies and it is too costly or inconvenient to install shielding to protect the signal. This sparked controversy initially because some politicians, notably Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts, are concerned that AM’s disappearance would compromise part of the emergency broadcast system. Now AM-gate has taken on a more sinister, and ridiculous, aspect.

Rather than a convoluted means of silencing talk radio, a more straightforward explanation is that AM radio just isn’t worth the bother. Some anecdotal evidence: Several years ago, I leased a BMW i3, a short-range EV. It turns out this was one of the first electric models that didn’t offer AM radio — the absence of which I was completely unaware of until I started researching this column. Possibly, that is just proof of a leftist disdain for certain wavelength modulation techniques. Or, perhaps, I am just one of the vast and growing majority of Americans who don’t listen to AM radio.

I am also part of the vast majority who don’t regularly use eight-tracks or cassette decks either. Streaming services allow drivers to play virtually anything they want, when they want, via smartphones — and that includes apps for AM stations. Note the big collapse in AM radio listeners during the 2010s as smartphones took hold; something that also shows up in data for FM’s market share, though that remains much higher. As much as Hannity might lament, and weaponise, this erosion of AM radio’s foothold, those same EVs often sport giant touchscreens where drivers cannot only listen to him but also watch him on video (if they so choose).

There is a long history of technological shifts creating winners, losers and lobbyists. The arrival of motor vehicles also caused conniptions, complete with suspicions of conspiracy. For example, when Wayne Dinsmore, pugnacious secretary of the Horse and Mule Association of America, was defending his cherished livestock against the rise of the tractor a century ago, he denounced the bias towards machines of the “mechanically minded” officials of the department of agriculture as well as the tad more sweeping “inclination of the human race to be lazy”.

The remarkable thing is that AM radio broadcasting has endured for so long. Its low quality, but wide ranging, signal is why it became more the preserve of professional gabbers in politics and sports while music migrated to FM stations. Being cheap, incumbent and familiar is a formidable combination. But it doesn’t confer immortality.

One could say the same thing about internal combustion engines and there can be little doubt the tangential link between AM radio’s decline and the energy transition offers one explanation for Hannity’s taking umbrage. Similar cultural significance is added to another climate-linked tussle, the stovetop war. While I dispute the inclination of humans to be lazy, our capacity to infuse technology with metaphor is undeniable. This is why so much of our debate about energy and climate confers — tiresomely so tribal and moral characteristics to molecules, electrons and the like.

There is something useful to consider in those concerns about AM radio’s role in emergency broadcasts. One of the underlying problems of the energy transition is, even under the fastest scenarios, we will rely on two competing systems for our energy for decades. As new alternatives to our mostly fossil-fuel based systems take market share, the economics of those incumbent systems deteriorate faster than our dependence on them, creating potential mismatches between supply and demand (see this for an analysis of the implications of EVs for oil refining). Similarly, the progressive drowning out of AM radio by competing services now appears to be reaching a tipping point even as some emergency officials still value it as a backup channel. Transitions are messy.

But transitions this big also take time. Battery EVs now account for less than 6% of new vehicle sales and maybe 1% of vehicles on the road. The minority of the minority of Americans who value access to AM radio while on the move and cannot get it via digital means have plenty of options at their disposal. That includes EVs made by the likes of Hyundai, which hasn’t ditched AM radio. Even if ambitious White House targets for EV sales are met, and those new vehicles mostly dispense with AM radio, turning over the entire fleet will take a few decades. That provides ample time for aficionados to transition their own tastes and for emergency warning experts to figure out alternatives. In theory, taxpayers could ultimately take on the funding of this public insurance policy, but one dreads to think what talk radio would make of that.

The fact is, if the likes of Ford thought they could charge customers for the cost of shielding their AM radio from electromagnetic buzz, or that ditching it was a deal-breaker, they would find a way to keep it. Legacy carmakers are mostly losing money on EVs today, so anything that boosts margins helps. Moreover, more than two-thirds of AM radio listeners are 55 or older, according to Nielsen Audio, making it even less of a priority to preserve that technology in a new generation of vehicles. On that front, Ford is set to soon drop AM radio from all passenger models, including gas-guzzlers. That’s right: AM radio is nothing less than an innocent victim of socialism. No, wait; my bad. I meant capitalism.

The marketplace of technologies is functioning as usual. Indeed, given revivals of older formats such as vinyl, don’t be surprised if, 20 years hence, carmakers start offering Nostalgia Package upgrades including an AM radio with leather-clad knobs — albeit, linked to a digital stream on the back end, maybe with some comforting static blended in.

More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com/opinion