Radio in the car: why it refuses to die

Every few years someone announces that car radio is finished. Streaming is in the dashboard, phones pair automatically, and nobody under thirty owns a radio at home. And yet get into almost any car in Casablanca, Cairo, Madrid or Lagos and the FM tuner is what is playing. This is not nostalgia or inertia. The car is the one environment where radio is still, by a clear margin, the best available technology.

Why the car is radio's strongest ground

• Your hands and eyes are taken. Radio is the only medium designed from the start for someone who cannot look at it. Every streaming app is a visual interface wearing an audio costume.

• It does not cost you data. An hour's commute each way at 128 kbps is about 2.5 GB a month. FM is free, forever, regardless of how long you sit in traffic.

• It does not drop in tunnels. FM gets noisy and comes back. A stream stops, buffers, reconnects, and starts you thirty seconds behind where you were.

• It knows where you are. A local station tells you that the road ahead is closed. No algorithm in the world is going to do that for you.

The traffic report is the killer feature

Navigation apps are better at routing than any radio bulletin, and they are not better at explaining. An app reroutes you around a jam without telling you there has been an accident, that the road will be closed for three hours, or that there is a protest downtown. A local presenter reading listener calls gives you the reason, and the reason is what lets you decide whether to wait, divert or turn around.

Getting the best out of it

Use RDS properly

Most cars built since the 1990s support RDS, which lets a station broadcast its name and, more usefully, hand your tuner over to a stronger transmitter of the same network as you drive out of range. If your radio keeps losing a national station on a long drive, the alternative-frequency setting is probably switched off. It is usually buried in the tuner menu as AF.

Set presets by road, not by taste

A preset list organised by favourite station is useless the moment you leave the city. Organise it the other way: the national network first, since it covers everywhere, then the strong regional stations on the routes you actually drive. You want the first button to work in every province.

Mix the sources deliberately

There is no reason to be loyal to one. The sensible setup is FM for the commute and for anything live, and streaming for a specific station you cannot receive — when you want a Cairo channel while driving through Marrakech, no transmitter is going to help you. Use the medium that fits the trip.

What streaming in the car actually breaks

Two things, and both are easy to miss until they bite. The first is that a dropped stream does not resume where it left off on a live station; it rejoins the live point, so you lose whatever happened during the tunnel. The second is that phone streaming keeps running when you park and walk away with the phone connected to the car, which is how people end up with a surprising data bill and no idea where it came from.

The car radio survived television, the cassette, the CD, the MP3 player and the smartphone. Each of them was supposed to finish it, and each of them ended up sitting next to it on the dashboard.

If your car has no FM and no screen

An older car with only a cassette or aux input can still carry a phone stream through a cheap wired adapter, and a wired connection sounds better than most Bluetooth links because it skips a second round of compression. Set the station before you move, lock the phone, and let the audio run — the point is to not touch it again until you park.