AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act Clears House, Raising Electric-Car Costs

Preserving free AM radio in new cars is straightforward as a policy goal but less straightforward as an electric-vehicle engineering requirement. The U.S. House passed the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act on September 15, 2026, advancing a mandate that could require automakers to suppress interference generated by their own high-voltage power electronics.

The measure, H.R. 979, is not yet law. It was placed on the Senate calendar on September 16 and still needs Senate passage and presidential approval. If enacted, it would give the Department of Transportation one year to issue a rule requiring factory-installed AM reception in new passenger vehicles built for or imported into the United States.

Manufacturers could not charge an additional fee, sell AM reception as a subscription or place it behind a paid software unlock. Until the rule took effect, vehicles without AM would need clear and conspicuous labeling. The public-access case is that drivers would retain a free source of information that does not depend on a cellular connection or subscription. FEMA says its National Public Warning System can reach more than 90 percent of the U.S. population directly, and most stations on the agency’s list broadcast on AM.

Why electric vehicles complicate AM reception

The central technical problem is frequency interference, not an inability to install a tuner. An electric vehicle’s traction inverter rapidly switches battery-supplied direct current into alternating current for the motor. That switching, along with activity elsewhere in the high-voltage system, produces electromagnetic noise that can overlap frequencies used by analog AM broadcasting.

The result can be static or degraded reception unless the vehicle is designed to control noise at its source, block its transmission through cables and structures, or prevent it from entering the receiver and antenna system. BMW has cited electromagnetic interference as a reason for poor analog AM reception, while Rivian has said electric-vehicle electromagnetism overlaps spectrum used by AM.

Available countermeasures include shielding, filtering, active noise cancellation and revised component placement. Stellantis has described using shielded high-voltage cables and connectors, as well as plans to locate AM and FM receiver components farther from electric-vehicle hardware in future infotainment systems. Lucid, meanwhile, has said it retained AM reception in its electric cars. Those differing approaches indicate that coexistence is technically possible, but they do not establish one universal cost for achieving it across vehicle architectures.

Placement changes may be relatively manageable when incorporated early in a new platform. Retrofitting an existing design can be more disruptive because cable routing, connector specifications, antennas, packaging space, thermal constraints and crash structures have already been established. Additional shielding can also add material, weight and assembly complexity. Filtering must suppress unwanted noise without compromising the intended operation of high-voltage components or other communication systems.

The reception standard will determine the real burden

The largest unresolved issue is what DOT would define as acceptable reception. The bill requires vehicles to receive and play AM content, but it leaves reception-quality details to the rulemaking process. A standard satisfied by receiver or software changes would carry a different engineering burden from one requiring reliable performance across a broad range of operating conditions.

That uncertainty helps explain the large gap between cost estimates. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation estimated mitigation costs of $3.8 billion over seven years and said available measures would reduce rather than eliminate interference. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that approximately 2 million to 2.5 million vehicles per year would be affected and projected an industry cost of “several millions of dollars each year.”

The estimates appear to rest on different assumptions about the compliance boundary. If manufacturers can qualify vehicles largely through tuner, antenna or software modifications, costs could remain comparatively limited. If the standard demands broader suppression of drivetrain-generated noise, compliance could reach into inverters, high-voltage wiring, connectors, packaging and platform validation. DOT’s eventual test conditions and performance threshold would therefore determine whether AM remains principally an infotainment feature or becomes a vehicle-wide electromagnetic-compatibility requirement.

Large manufacturers would generally receive no more than two years after the final rule to comply. Manufacturers that produced 40,000 or fewer U.S.-market passenger vehicles in 2022 would receive at least four years. Hybrid digital AM reception could qualify, although the bill’s definition excludes all-digital AM stations. The act and DOT’s enforcement authority would expire eight years after enactment, and the Government Accountability Office would study emergency-alert delivery and AM broadcasting’s effectiveness.

For now, the Senate controls the bill’s next legislative step. If it advances and becomes law, however, the most consequential decision will move to DOT: defining reception well enough to preserve useful, free access without turning a radio requirement into an unnecessarily broad redesign of electric propulsion systems.

By Thomas Caldwell — AMI’s senior editor for mechanical and mobility engineering, covering vehicle electronics, systems integration, electrification, chassis systems, propulsion, and safety policy.