Roughly 2 to 2.5 million new vehicles a year would need updated radio hardware if a bill sitting in the House right now becomes law, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s own cost estimate. The AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act would force automakers to keep AM broadcast reception standard equipment in every new car sold in the United States, at no extra charge to buyers, undoing a trend that had already spread from Tesla to BMW, Volkswagen, Volvo, Polestar and Rivian. The reason those automakers pulled the feature isn’t a mystery or a cost-cutting whim: it’s electromagnetic interference generated by the same high-voltage hardware that makes an EV move. As of this writing the bill has cleared committee and is headed for a House floor vote, but it has not yet been signed into law.
What the Bill Actually Does
The current version, H.R. 979 in the House and S. 315 in the Senate, would require the Department of Transportation to issue a rule within one year of enactment ensuring AM stations remain accessible in every new passenger vehicle manufactured or sold domestically. The mandate would sunset after eight years, and the Government Accountability Office would have a year to report on AM radio’s role in the national emergency alert system. The CBO’s estimate puts federal implementation costs at about $1 million between 2026 and 2031, with manufacturer compliance costs in the low millions annually, well under the thresholds that trigger the strictest unfunded-mandate review. The bill also preempts state and local rules on the subject, so there’s no patchwork where automakers keep AM in some states and drop it in others.
Where the Bill Actually Stands
This isn’t the first time Congress has tried. An earlier version, introduced in 2023 as S. 1669, had bipartisan sponsors but died without a floor vote. The current bill is sponsored by Reps. Gus Bilirakis and Frank Pallone in the House and Sens. Ted Cruz and Ed Markey in the Senate, an unusual pairing across the ideological spectrum that reflects how the issue has been framed less as a culture-war fight and more as an emergency-communications question. The legislation was folded into the broader Build America 250 Act surface-transportation package after clearing the House Transportation Committee, and House leadership has scheduled floor consideration. It still needs to clear the Senate and reach the President’s desk before automakers face any actual legal deadline.
The Actual Engineering Problem
The interference is real, not manufactured as an excuse. High-voltage cables, inverters, and electric motors switch enormous currents extremely fast, and that switching throws off electromagnetic fields strong enough to blot out an AM signal, which encodes information by varying amplitude, the exact property EV powertrain noise disrupts most easily. A technical report from the Center for Automotive Research lays out the mechanism directly: rapid current switching in high-voltage components generates fields that can overwhelm the AM band. Some automakers, including Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Kia, Hyundai and Stellantis, chose to solve the problem with shielding and filtering instead of removing the feature, proving the interference is an engineering challenge with an engineering answer, not an inevitability.
Why Lawmakers Say It Matters
The emergency-broadcast argument is what’s carried the bill across party lines. In a December 2022 letter to automakers, Sen. Ed Markey and colleagues noted that FEMA’s National Public Warning System “operates primarily through AM radio stations” that are built with backup generators and hardened infrastructure specifically so they survive disasters that knock out cell networks and internet service. Former FEMA Administrator Brock Long put it plainly in the same letter: “No other means of electronic communications in the country is as efficient or reliable as the radio.” That argument — that AM isn’t a nostalgia format but critical infrastructure — is what’s kept a bill that stalled once already alive for a second run at passage.
Whether or not this exact bill clears the Senate before its current session ends, the underlying tension isn’t going away: the electrical engineering that makes EVs quiet and efficient is fundamentally at odds with a communications technology built around amplitude, and Washington has decided that’s a fight regulation should settle rather than leaving it to the market.