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(car radios) FM Required (1973) ?

kfbkfb

kfbkfb

www.discogs.com

Various - AM Gold 1973

View credits, reviews, tracks and shop for the 1994 CD release of "AM Gold 1973" on Discogs.
www.discogs.com www.discogs.com
^^^
In 1973, for the first time, car radios were required by law to receive FM...


Bought some these AM Gold CDs at a CVS drug store a few days ago (not 1973 though), this statement about FM being required is unexpected (when the FCC required TVs to have ATSC 1.0 DTV tuners, there was some concern as to whether the FCC could order such a thing, research found that the FCC had ordered certain UHF TV tuner specs so there was a precedent).

(of course, I'll be listening to them in fake surround sound via my new $12 CD player)


Kirk Bayne
 
My 1973 Chevy Vega and my 1976 Chevy El Camino came with radios that were AM only. The 1983 Plymouth Reliant I bought afterwards also offered an AM-only radio, but I bought it without any radio installed.

AFAIK, there has never been a mandate that any kind of radio be installed in a car.
 
ThePowerCow said:
I had a 1980 model with AM only
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fybush said:
There was not and has never been any such mandate. GM and Ford were still selling stripped-down models with AM only well into the 80s.
Click to expand...
KeithE4 said:
AFAIK, there has never been a mandate that any kind of radio be installed in a car.
Click to expand...

Agreed. My parents bought a new Chevy Malibu in about '82 and it had AM only. I recall them trying to buy an FM converter for it, but the antenna into the back of their stock radio had a strange connector on it which wouldn't work with the converters on the market at the time, so they just suffered through until they sold the car about 5 years later. Of course, back then there were plenty of music options on AM, and even though the car had an in-windshield antenna if I recall correctly, it really pulled in even distant signals nicely.
 
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The European Union has a mandate that all new cars have to have DAB+ radios factory-fitted (if they have a radio at all, which they universally do now). This has been in place since 2014 and also affects non-EU markets that take European cars, such as the UK, as well as EU markets that have no (official) DAB+ transmissions, such as Ireland. These radios can always receive FM and AM as well, so drivers in non-DAB+ markets just don't use the DAB+ "band".

My car is a 2012 and came with an FM/AM radio, but I took it into the shop to have it retrofitted with a DAB+ radio because that's the direction of travel and the choice of stations and formats is vastly superior. In my area, you go from roughly 7-8 stations across FM and AM to 60+ stations on DAB+, and I'm in an underserved area. Major cities increasingly have 100+ stations.

I can see both sides. Without the mandate, car makers may have continued to just fit the cheapest option, i.e. FM/AM, which stifles progress and competition in broadcasting. But there is now a law saying DAB+ is compulsory on car radios - what happens when DAB+ is yesterday's technology, as is already starting to happen with the advent of 5G? Most of the time when I'm in my car nowadays, I have a 500Mbps or more data connection, more than good enough to stream anything I want. It will end up looking backward, like mandating AM radios would be in 2022.
 
ThePowerCow said:
I had a 1980 model with AM only
Click to expand...
My '78 Chevy Nova, '82 Ford Mustang and '83 Ford Tempo were AM only. My first car with FM was a 1984 Subaru. These were all bought used, by the way, as all my cars have been. I tend to run them into the ground or -- in the case of three of them, total them in collisions.
 
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kfbkfb said:
when the FCC required TVs to have ATSC 1.0 DTV tuners, there was some concern as to whether the FCC could order such a thing, research found that the FCC had ordered certain UHF TV tuner specs so there was a precedent
Click to expand...
In both case, Congress passed a specific law mandating such a rule. The Commission must enact rules to follow the laws set forth by Congress.

I agree with the others, there was no rule in 1973 that required cars to have AM/FM. My parents' 1976 Chevy Malibu did not have FM. Sometime in the 1980s, AM/FM became nearly universal. I think that's primarily down to the free market demanding AM/FM, and FM becoming cheap to implement in solid state radios, not a rule enacted by the government.
 
fybush said:
There was not and has never been any such mandate. GM and Ford were still selling stripped-down models with AM only well into the 80s.
Click to expand...
I bought a new Chevy in 1986 (much younger and poorer then.) Base model only had an AM radio; I had to pay extra to add FM+cassette player.
 
As everybody has said---there never was any such mandate. Eventually, manufacturers made AM/FM the base audio system based purely on take rates (how many people ordered/bought cars equipped that way), as people were increasingly listening to FM stations.

It's harder than I thought it would be to track down the last car offered by a manufacturer with an AM radio standard, but I've found it in GM products as late as 1989.
 
michael hagerty said:
And it took effect in 1964.
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UHF on those early sets was tuned using a knob that ran through the channels much as a tuning knob does on an analog radio -- continous from 14 to 83, with no resistance to let you know you'd landed directly on a channel. They were also subjecf to drifting.

I remember the day we got our first such set -- I was 9 or 10 and dad put it in his and mom's bedroom. I sneaked up there one afternoon after school and explored the mysterious UHF dial, finding a nun teaching a school lesson on Channel 38 (then WIHS, the present WSBK) and a test pattern on Channel 14 (WJZB Worcester). No 56, no 25, no 44, those stations were years away. I told dad about the channels I'd found, led him upstairs and started to demonstrate. Panic and anger crossed his face immediately: "Just leave it alone! You'll break the TV!" It was a few months before he finally accepted that watching UHF was not going to ruin the set for VHF reception.
 
fybush said:
There was not and has never been any such mandate. GM and Ford were still selling stripped-down models with AM only well into the 80s.
Click to expand...
As late as 1990, GM and Ford still had AM-only radios available as a delete option. And in 1985 Chrysler introduced the first AM-only car radio with digital tuning:

digitally-tuned-radio-jpg.53279
 
There was a TV commercial for a car in the early 1980s which advertised an included, free AM radio. (I cannot remember which make/model). I remember thinking, "Who would want that?" Even by the early 1980s, FM was really almost essential and an AM only radio, not a selling point.
 
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