This one is for broadcasters. On September 15, 2026, the US House passed a bill that would require every new car sold in the country to ship with an AM receiver as standard equipment. I want to tell you what the law actually does, how long before it turns into a real rule, and why I do not think it brings your station a single listener.
The short version: the law saves nobody in radio. It buys presence on the dashboard of a car that already belongs to the phone. And what it actually guarantees is narrower than the headline suggests. The digital way out points at HD Radio, and fully digital AM stations are left out of it by definition.
What actually passed
The bill is H.R. 979, the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act of 2025, introduced by Florida representative Gus Bilirakis. It has been in the House since February 2025, picked up 317 cosponsors and passed on September 15, 2026 by voice vote, with no roll call recorded. It now goes to the Senate, where a twin bill exists, S. 315, from senator Ed Markey, which came out of the Commerce Committee in April 2025.
The law does not kick in tomorrow
What you hear all over the place is that new cars are getting radio back. They are not. Anyone who reads the text as approved in the House at the primary source sees that the Department of Transportation has one year to write the rule, and that rule does not take effect until at most two years after it is published. Small manufacturers, the ones that sold 40,000 or fewer passenger vehicles in the US in 2022, get at least four years.
Until that rule exists, what holds is the middle part: a manufacturer building a car without AM has to put clear and conspicuous labeling on it telling the buyer the car has no receiver, and cannot charge anything extra for the lack.
Why the electric car killed AM
No automaker dropped AM for a styling decision. The problem is genuinely electrical. The motor, the inverter and the wiring in an EV generate noise that an AM receiver, working in the 535 to 1705 kilohertz band, cannot separate from the signal. Engine running, constant static.
Anyone who has fixed a radio knows this fight. It is the same refrigerator motor bleeding into the band, only at industrial scale with an automaker in place of the service technician.
The digital way out points at HD Radio
This is where almost everyone read the text wrong. The bill lets an automaker meet the rule with a receiver that picks up "digital audio AM broadcast stations". Section 2, paragraph 8 defines those: an AM station using an In Band On Channel DAB system, which is HD Radio, as defined in the FCC's own rule 47 CFR 73.402. In that system the digital signal goes out in the same channel and the same spectrum as the analog signal, which is what the FCC's definition says. So the way out points at a hybrid receiver, one that keeps handing you the analog AM alongside.
And there is a carve-out almost nobody mentions. The same definition says a "digital audio AM broadcast station" does not include an all-digital AM station, the mode where the station broadcasts only digitally modulated subcarriers plus the unmodulated AM carrier. Paragraph 8(B). Translated for an operator: if your US station moves from hybrid AM to all-digital mode, it walks out of the path the bill offers the automaker as an option. The text leaves it out on purpose.
Look also at the definition of "AM broadcast station" in paragraph 3 of section 2: a station licensed by the FCC that operates on a channel in the 535 to 1705 kHz band. The word analog does not appear once in the bill. The guarantee was written onto the channel and the license, not onto the modulation.
The real argument is the emergency alert
Follow this story and you notice the supporters never talk about music. They talk about IPAWS, the US public warning system, which has AM stations in the gear train. The text orders the GAO, Congress's oversight office, to conduct a comprehensive study on disseminating emergency alerts and warnings to the public, assess the role of vehicles in that system, and say whether other alert technologies can reach at least 90 percent of the US population in a crisis, at night included. Section 3(g). In other words, the bill itself admits the alert can arrive by a route that does not go through radio at all.
The bill also requires a report before the rule, on possible impacts to the safety of automated driving vehicles that receive AM. And it orders the GAO to consult broadcasters during that study. Section 3(g)(3)(H).
On the other end, the FCC is working on EAS: on September 29, broadcasters associations from 49 states asked that software-based EAS stay voluntary through the transition, echoing earlier comments from the NAB and the warning from Sage Alerting Systems according to Radio World. A small station that works should not be forced to replace the equipment it would use to warn people.
Where I disagree with everyone
The dashboard is a phone now. You reach over, ask for a playlist, and the car pulls it from the phone over Bluetooth, CarPlay or Android Auto. Radio became one entry on a list, next to podcasts and streaming. You do not turn on the radio. It is an option. And the screen now belongs to Apple, Google and the automaker. That is why AM disappeared without a law and without the industry crying about it: a product engineering decision, made in a room where radio was not present.
The law is weaker than it sounds. Nothing guarantees that the car arriving with standard AM will have anyone tuning to AM. The automaker ships the receiver, drops it in the source list, and the listener picks the podcast, because that is what he asked for.
So I disagree with "radio is dying" and I disagree with "Congress saved us". Both sides are wrong.
What to do now
If you run a station:
- Do not wait for the law. It covers cars sold in the US. The rest of the world still has no deadline at all.
- Test the alert end to end. If your station runs EAS, the path runs from the desk to the transmitter, and that is where it breaks. The FCC is discussing moving the alert to software, and the associations asked for that to stay voluntary through the transition (Radio World).
- Get your numbers ready before the GAO study. The text orders the GAO to consult broadcasters. A station holding coverage, power and alert history joins the conversation. One without it just reads the report.
- Treat the car like an app. Your listener will find you over Bluetooth, CarPlay or straight from the phone. Make sure your station name looks good in those paths.
If you are a listener:
- Check for AM when you buy a car. Some models keep it. Some do not.
- Expect the radio to be visible. The rule talks about access "in a manner that is easily accessible to drivers", section 3(a)(2). A radio buried three menus deep in a screen is not what the text asked for.
- Keep your phone alerts on. It does not replace AM, but it is what is in your hand.
If you are not on air online yet, you can get your station on AppRadio, with a public page, a web player and a listener dashboard. One day the new car will ship with AM as standard. Nobody is making you wait for that day to go on air.