Marc Haine explains why Tesla removed AM/FM radio from its cars and why that matters for emergencies. Analog radio and ham operators stay crucial when power fails or EMPs hit. Older computers like 486 systems survive cyberattacks that cripple modern machines.
One of the things that I lament is Tesla, about a year and a half ago, they made an announcement that there will no longer be AM radio, AM or FM radio in their Teslas. So essentially everything is digital. And I say, well, what happens if there's no internet, which happens in disasters a lot? Or what happens if it's so bad that you can't access? Radios still remain an incredible emergency communication source. Yeah. So much so that in the United States, we rely on ham radio operators, and of which I've been certified for almost 20 years now, that we rely on them for emergency communications to ensure continuity of the government, of the armed forces, of critical government infrastructure. They rely on radio. And so when you don't have AM and FM all of a sudden, now you have folks who literally is like, who knows how to deal with analog? Not a lot of people. How do you communicate with the population? Absolutely. And in fact, I was actually at the cyber conference. I was chatting with a friend of mine, and he He was actually saying, you know, weirdly enough, some of the old technologies we have in computers, you know, like the 486s and stuff, weirdly enough, those are almost immune now to cyberattack, almost totally immune. You know why? Because the protocols that we use to make the 486 work, we don't use any of them anymore. All the protocols are gone. We used to use them. They stopped using— the last protocol of a 486 was used in 2009. Wow. He goes, so literally, weirdly enough, you have a massive cyberattack. If you use something like a 486 computer, some of the old processors, it would actually make us immune because they're only trying to remain on the cutting edge, right? So what you are saying is absolutely right. People would have to go back to an old system theoretically, especially like if you had something like an EMP attack, which is an electromagnetic pulse attack where you knock out all kinds of things. How do you rely on things that don't rely on the internet? Don't rely on modern electronics and boards. That would be very, very tough. Even in cars, for those of you who are hearing this, how many of us have cars that basically rely on a computer chip? And if that computer chip were not working, would our cars work? And I can just tell you right now, I already know the answer. The answer is no. They wouldn't even turn on.
