Regulations (ignoring riders, graft, and other political inefficiencies) are made with consideration for relative costs, compliance, ease of enforcement, ...
Forcing manufacturers to keep an AM antenna hooked up to the infotainment they're already including is pretty cheap, easy to enforce, and will have high compliance. Moreso because they already have the engineering expertise for doing so.
It also forces at least one AM radio into the hands of >90% American households, and since for most disasters there's some kind of an evacuation you'll likely be in your car rather than your home.
Could we draw a line in the sand somewhere else (e.g., building codes)? Sure. It'll be a higher cost solution that grandfathers in most homes as not having an AM radio though. Could we mandate disaster bags? It'll probably devolve into a cottage industry of the cheapest thing that's maybe legal with low compliance of households even buying something to that standard, but sure, we can do that too. A "greedy" (as in greedy algorithms) utilitarian perspective might be valuable here though. Instead of bikeshedding, does this bill help make people safer at an appropriate cost? If so, pointing to other lines in the sand is reasonable insofar as we want to make the law better, but not to refute the law in the first place. If not, we ought to be able to point to those reasons instead of other lines in the sand.
Forcing manufacturers to keep an AM antenna hooked up to the infotainment they're already including is pretty cheap, easy to enforce, and will have high compliance. Moreso because they already have the engineering expertise for doing so.
It also forces at least one AM radio into the hands of >90% American households, and since for most disasters there's some kind of an evacuation you'll likely be in your car rather than your home.
Could we draw a line in the sand somewhere else (e.g., building codes)? Sure. It'll be a higher cost solution that grandfathers in most homes as not having an AM radio though. Could we mandate disaster bags? It'll probably devolve into a cottage industry of the cheapest thing that's maybe legal with low compliance of households even buying something to that standard, but sure, we can do that too. A "greedy" (as in greedy algorithms) utilitarian perspective might be valuable here though. Instead of bikeshedding, does this bill help make people safer at an appropriate cost? If so, pointing to other lines in the sand is reasonable insofar as we want to make the law better, but not to refute the law in the first place. If not, we ought to be able to point to those reasons instead of other lines in the sand.