Posted on 05/23/2023 9:13:50 AM PDT by conservative98
I can still play my 8-tracks on the Panasonic recorder.
Yes my 2015 Hyundai has a remote start option.
If I pay Hyundai so much a month… all this means to me is my car can be hacked.
I am not paying a subscription fee to use a product I own, ever.
Part of me wants to make my next car a complete restoration of an old vehicle. Upgrade the safety features and components but 100% analog/mechanical.
I drove a brand new Mazda cx5 last few days while my car was in the shop. Nice enough vehicle but so much stupid and unneccessary tech. Adaptive cruise control stinks. Etc etc. I am sure you can turn most if not all of it off but was only a loaner for a few days so not point investing mental energy into how to turn all that annoying crap off.
I really can’t see a new car appealing to me any longer… just so much extra nonsense, and I do mean nonsense. I don’t need or want a bud, annoying giant screen in my field of vision constantly changing distracting me from driving? No thanks.. car yelling at me every time I’m not dead center of the lane or vibrating the steering wheel every time I cross a line going up or down a 2 lane winding road with no one else on it…
I already have a wife an ex and 2 daughters. I don’t need my car nagging me roo.
In other words there was no reason not to include it because the vehicles already had the hardware
“For any owners of Ford’s EVs without AM broadcast capability, we’ll offer a software update” to restore it...”
If it can be restored with a software update, then there weren’t any cost savings to be had removing it from the vehicles in the first place. It was definitely done purely out of spite for their customers.
Gosh! I always thought that once woke always woke.
The CX-5 is among the more analog of modern vehicles and it's quite appreciated. Even the techie in me can't tolerate the everything's a screen trend because I know it's terrible ergonomics.
I enjoy long distance driving and hate stop-and-go traffic. I'm not looking forward to a day where there's only self-driving cars if I'm still capable of driving myself. It'll never fit the feel of how I drive or make the same choices.
“we’ll offer a software update” to restore it”
Hmm. That means the AM capability does not add to the cost of the radio. Why did they take it out? I have a couple of AM stations on my presets.
Maybe it added a sentence or two to the owner’s manual. Now that costs money!
I have a pile of those 8-tracks and no way to play them
Love AM radio 📻 ❤
AM receivers need a ferrite antenna for good reception, which is why they are heavy. Cars today have a dorsal blade antenna, which works okay for FM, GPS, and cell phone reception, though not great at any of them. The issue, as I understood it, was interference from the switching power supplies used for EV motors. Self interference. Making an antenna and power supply that can filter out that noise and receive AM well is a challenge. All the software can do is mess with tuning range of the receiver, but you will most likely only be able to get nearby AM stations. Don't count on getting WSB late at night in Miami.
It wasn't the radio, it was the transmitter. AM radio has decent range during the day and magnificent rage at night. That's because of atmospheric conditions and the frequency range. Some stations will power their transmitters down at night to avoid interfering with other transmitters in the U.S. or our neighbors to the north or south. Look up shortwave radio. You can hear things from all around the world in the right conditions.
I guess they figured out how easy it is to go to a parts store and get an old AM radio.
While it’s good that Ford restored it, as there are still a lot of older people that use it, the fact in that matter is all terrestrial radio is going to go away eventually, as it becomes more and more irrelevant in the days of internet and smartphones. Seriously, I’ve owned three vehicles since 2015 and never as much as turned on the AM or FM radio, I listen to Podcasts and music through the cars USB connection to my cell phone. Who wants to listen to 10 minutes of commercials then some garbage song you don’t even like, when you can just use your own music playlist or put on a podcast on a topic that interests you?
My first two used cars in the 70s didn’t have any radio at all. I had to go to a junkyard and buy an AM radio and figure out how to mount it and wire it.
Oh, yeah, I bought an after-market cassette player and had to figure out how to mount it, also.
My next car had an 8-track built in.
They will be able to get plenty of AM radios out of their stock of unsold EVs.
Check out SDRPlay and the Hermes Lite 2. Both are targeted at hams with the Hermes being an HF transceiver. They are a bit more than $35 though :)
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