I haven't listened to AM radio in a long time but I don't know how useful it would really be in an age of smartphones, I guess the argument is if the world was ending, but then again, wouldn't you, like, notice that anyway?

Just today, K238AZ FM 95.5 was off the air due to some kind of technical glitch. Fortunately, the AM station that translator is tied to, could still be heard, just not as crisp and clear as FM.

Also FM radio is line of sight. Once you get far enough from the transmitter that the tip of the antenna is below the horizon, you no longer can hear it. While there is a little bit of earth curvature following between 88 and 108 mhz, it is nothing like what 550 khz to 1700 khz will do, which is propagate hundreds of miles via ground wave propagation, and late at night when the D layer of the ionosphere goes away, it can even skip off of the F layer and thus in west Texas you can hear stations in Chicago, stations down in the interior of Mexico, and other signals from far away.

The faux "reason" they give is that the switching power circuitry in electric cars produces a lot of electromagnetic interference.

Well, it does, but the technology is there to filter the high circulating energy in these switching circuits to keep the radio energy produced from escaping into the surroundings.

Actually the FCC has some pretty stringent regulations considering incidental RF egress from high speed switching circuits, and for the ordinary PC to exist, they have to meet some pretty strict emission limits.

The same problem happened with Variable Speed Drives started showing up in the oil field. I worked with a fellow ham to get a multi-million dollar installation shut down until they fixed the cacophony that splattered all over from 80 meters up through 6 meters, and beyond. We took measurements all through various radio services from AM broadcast (which it totally wiped out) through the HF spectrum, and well into the VHF.

What got action to happen was when we proved there was a lot of noise in the aviation nav and com bands, from 108 to 118 mhz and 118 to 136 mhz. We brought out data to the FAA as well as the FCC, and one cheapskate oil lease operator pretty much had to filter their systems to keep the noise out of the power lines, install the grounds they were originally too cheap to put the extra wires in to do, and they couldn't operate the VFDs until each one actually passed emission limit testing, and they could prove that any leakage met the FCC limits.

It cost them millions. They had to put in some of the biggest inductors and capacitors in low pass L and Pi configurations of any I've ever seen. The biggest high current high voltage inductors, designed to pass 60 hz and roll off sharply by many decibels by the time it got to about 500 hz, were about the size of 55 gallon drums. And they needed 3 of each per VFD and per motor.

Then to suppress the higher frequencies, they had some smaller inductors and capacitors because really huge inductors and capacitors have inter-winding capacitance and lead inductance, so you put smaller value inductors in series and smaller capacitors in parallel (see the ARRL Handbook for circuit design specifics to build a very high dB attenuating low pass filter).

At last, they were allowed to turn them on one at a time with inspectors present with instrumentation.

Once they cleaned up the RFI, not only did radios work in the region again, but it suppressed the harmonic currents and kept the power company happy by not damaging transformers at the big substation from high harmonic current being kicked back down the power lines.

People don’t listen to smartphones while driving. It’s not convenient for a long drive. You aren’t part of the AM generation. I grew up listening to music on AM because it was usually better than FM.

A lot of people can’t get consistent FM reception when driving in hilly areas. What do you think is the real reason for wanting to dump AM?

Actually I did grow up listening to it, a lot. I’ve always gravitated to silence in vehicles for some reason.

Maybe to pay better attention to the road.

Because AM radio won't lead to revenue enhancement - that is, subscriptions to premium things like Sirius XM

But we don’t want enhancements, we want basics. I tried a subscription radio once. It was Ok but not worth renewing.