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What will little Susie Do?

P

pocket-radio

So Range Rover, Mercedes, Audi, BMW, Ford, Hyundai, Kia, Jaguar, Lincoln, Mercury MINI, Scion and Volvo.
have committed to factory-installed HD Radio as standard or optional equipment. We know that..

Ok, so what's likely to happen when the rubber hits the road?

When the radio flip flops back and fourth between analog and digital. Will little Susie, a Mercedes driving soccer mom think, oh that's just the way it works? Or will little Susie rush back to Dicks Mercedes because she think her baby, her Mercedes, has a faulty radio? What will little Susie do? Will she except the bla bla bla from her service adviser and sales rep, or will Sue demand a new radio that works. I'm thinking won't be happy with the slop she's been sold. And hey for a car that cost $50k shouldn't the radio work with no flaws?
 
She'd probably complain loudly to the salespeople at the Mercedes dealership about HD radio reception, not knowing that the reception is very limited.
 
Most would expect the radio in their expensive new car to perform at least as well as the radio in their old one.
 
New car owners won't accept the unreliability, complexity and trade offs necessary just to get a few HD2, and HD3 channels.

All that annoyance just to listen to the broadcast computer equivalent of someone else's iPod?

Fortunately many new cars also include a very reliable iPod connection that will deliver continuous digital quality music of their choice wherever they go. The iPod is a small additional investment, and avoids the reception problems inherent with HD Radio.
 
I already posted on this subject last fall, when Jag announced it was suspending HD Radio because of customer complaints about audio system performance. They were retrofitting analog-only radios into Jaguars pursuant to a factory bulletin dating to September. (Something about how buyers had the quaint inclination to demand that the radios in their new $75,000 cars didn't constantly "hunt" among analog-digital, stereo-mono with the concomitant annoyance of poor time-alignment at HD radio stations.) I don't know why Jag went back to HD - I suspect it may have something to do with the fact that Land Rover and Jag were sold by Ford to India's Tata Motors.

As for Ford - maybe they're gonna feature HD but you can't prove it by my recent shopping experience. The two finalists in my new-car search were the Jeep Patriot and the Ford Escape (the Patriot won out; better deal.) Nobody at the Ford OR Chrysler stores had ever heard of HD Radio. As soon as I said the magic words "you know, DIGITAL radio" the sales guys reached for Sirius/XM literature.

And among the marques listed, Lincoln, Mercury, Ford and Volvo are all Ford products. Didn't we see that Ford was going to sit HD out until/unless they get their 10x digital power increase?
 
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