The vast majority of vehicles on the road still have them so, again, unless you are truly in the middle of nowhere you can generally flag someone down while you watch Clover be a metaphor for 9-11 and remember “oh yeah, Lizzy Caplan was in this”
And as cars move away from AM/FM: Then we have alternate emergency solutions. Which, again, weather radio in the emergency bag that you just leave in your trunk until you sell the car. And we work to improve the coverage and resilience of emergency broadcasts that phones pick up (speaking of…).
Which gets back to all of this being a “sneaky” way to insist phones need headphone jacks. Since you need an antenna for FM and that is usually a speaker wire. Which… is extra useless and increasingly dangerous if you are trying to hold up your earbuds (because we all still have wired earbuds…) while driving through The Mist.
… which also highlights why a phone is a bad emergency radio. Since plugging in earbuds will generally cut off the phone speakers. But you also need to hold up the earbuds to get enough reception to get a signal. Or you are driving with earbuds in which lowers your awareness during an emergency.
Again, emergency/weather radios. They are cheap, a lot of them have backup hand cranks, and you can just put it in the roadside emergency bag right next to the electric flares/beacons that are basically one time use because, if you pull that tab, the batteries WILL have corroded ten years later when you need them again.
In the US, you can get magnesium road flares. IIRC, some places in Europe don’t permit them due to fire risk, but in the States, I can get them even in California (which is probably about the most fire-conscious state out there).
The vast majority of vehicles on the road still have them so, again, unless you are truly in the middle of nowhere you can generally flag someone down while you watch Clover be a metaphor for 9-11 and remember “oh yeah, Lizzy Caplan was in this”
And as cars move away from AM/FM: Then we have alternate emergency solutions. Which, again, weather radio in the emergency bag that you just leave in your trunk until you sell the car. And we work to improve the coverage and resilience of emergency broadcasts that phones pick up (speaking of…).
Which gets back to all of this being a “sneaky” way to insist phones need headphone jacks. Since you need an antenna for FM and that is usually a speaker wire. Which… is extra useless and increasingly dangerous if you are trying to hold up your earbuds (because we all still have wired earbuds…) while driving through The Mist.
… which also highlights why a phone is a bad emergency radio. Since plugging in earbuds will generally cut off the phone speakers. But you also need to hold up the earbuds to get enough reception to get a signal. Or you are driving with earbuds in which lowers your awareness during an emergency.
Again, emergency/weather radios. They are cheap, a lot of them have backup hand cranks, and you can just put it in the roadside emergency bag right next to the electric flares/beacons that are basically one time use because, if you pull that tab, the batteries WILL have corroded ten years later when you need them again.
In the US, you can get magnesium road flares. IIRC, some places in Europe don’t permit them due to fire risk, but in the States, I can get them even in California (which is probably about the most fire-conscious state out there).