Never understood people complaining of radio ads until I got to hear what American radio is like. They legit play ads after almost every song. Yikes!

Radio ads can:

- be turned off by turning off the radio - are not inherent to the operation of the vehicle

Classic radio is down-only. It goes through hardware for demodulation and amplification. I can turn a classic radio off.

How long will it be until there is an ad that makes it confusing how to dismiss it and uses a police siren to get your attention? How long until someone uses the radio to ransomware your car using a remote code execution vulnerability?

> How long will it be until there is an ad that makes it confusing how to dismiss it and uses a police siren to get your attention?

When I was in high school, the local radio station played a siren as part of the intro to their traffic update segment. Being a high schooler, I naturally had my volume cranked up pretty high - leading to at least a once-a-week near-swerve on my way to school as the segment began.

LMAO fail.

Radio is optional as you can switch it off at any time, change the volume, is not imposed by the manufacturer, and you had the option to listen to your own cassetes and later CDs and digital for 50+ years.

You must not have exprienced modern vehicles. My 2013 Chysler Pacifica's factory headunit occasionally stops kicking the watchdog timer and gets rebooted. When that happens, the radio is still playing and can't be switched off or volume adjusted until the thing is done booting.

So no, you can't switch it off at any time.

That would be the exception, not the rule with radio (that it would need to be, to justify using it as an example of a driving nuissance as the grandparent did).

And this exception points to the current trend for manufactured control + everything as a platform, so it can be seen as a further argument towards the point we're making here against this trend.

This would be an example of where more complicated isn't better. Our car is from 2004 but neither it nor any car I've ever owned has ever had this problem.

I cannot imagine putting up with this. I would rather mount a bluetooth speaker on the dash.

There are options that don't have ads including satellite radio, and communication via stereo cable or Bluetooth with your phone which can play music via local storage or streamed.