The future is being written for listening to the radio in cars

Radio Ready is a new global initiative designed to make sure we continue to have easy access to radio in our cars.

Listening to the radio in the car is almost as old as the automobile itself. The very first time anyone demonstrated the operation of the new-fangled wireless devices was at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis when American inventor Lee DeForest demonstrated his cutting-edge technology. It worked just fine, but since proper radio stations would not exist for at least another dozen years, this was really just a proof-of-concept thing that was over most people’s heads.

By 1922, commercial radio was starting to catch on, and several inventors were keen to install receivers in cars. An amateur named George Frost showed off a radio that he MacGyvered in a Ford Model T. Others followed: the Airtone 3D in 1925 and the Philco Transitone of 1927. Nice, but impractical. They were very bulky, ran on very fragile vacuum tubes and were very expensive. A Transitone cost $150 (about $2,300 in today’s money) when you could buy a whole car for under $700. Electrical interference from the car’s ignition system was also a major problem.

The big breakthrough came in 1930 when the owner of a radio supply business, William R. Lear (yes, the Learjet guy and the first promoter of the 8-track player) worked with Elmer Wavering (one of his employees and the inventor of the car alternator) met up with Paul and Joseph Galvin, owners of an electronics manufacturer.

Together, they built a radio for Paul’s Studebaker. It was big and bulky – all the controls were mounted on the steering column – but it worked and sounded good. Galvin then drove it to a radio manufacturers convention in Chicago, parked it outside, cranked it up, and the orders flooded in for his “Motorola.”  (Yes, the same people who are now in the mobile phone business.) It was still expensive – $110 — but it was the first useful and practical car radio.

As the technology improved — solid state circuits replaced vacuum tubes in the 1950s, the introduction of in-dash FM radios in 1952 — it was unimaginable for any vehicle to be without a radio for entertainment, news, companionship and keeping one awake on long, late-night drives. It’s free, it’s local and when done right, it feels like the person on the other side of the speaker is riding along with you. Even today, about 80 per cent of in-car listening is radio.

Today, infotainment systems are deeply integrated into automobile systems and offer all kinds of listening options and connectivity. Radio is still there, but it has to compete against many other options and functions.

When I travel, I like to rent vehicles from different manufacturers to see what they’re doing infotainment-wise. On more than one occasion, I’ve become frustrated when it comes to finding the radio functions. Why would anyone bury a radio, something that’s been part of the driving experience for almost 100 years, so deep in the interface that you can’t use it?

The good news is that there’s plenty of pushback. At the WorldDAB Automotive 2025 Conference in Madrid, public and private broadcasters — some 200 senior executives — from all over the world got together to deliver this message: Broadcast radio must remain prominent in vehicles. If not, motorists will miss out on a lot — and radio itself could fatally suffer from underexposure.