I find "Safety is a giant concern" to be alarmist. I don't see that it's a major concern. People will be unprepared with standalone radios, sure, but people will be unprepared in all sorts of different ways, and "we'll bolt a radio receiver into every car" is an extremely bizarre way to force people to be prepared. If one really thinks that car ownership should confer radio ownership, bundle a cheap portable radio with every car. Bonus: it's not bolted to the car and can be used when disaster strikes and you're not on wheels!

People will adapt. The car radio was not designed as a safety device, nor does it serve as a particularly good one. It takes on that function somewhat by default, and occasionally does OK, but it's not nearly as important as he makes it out to be, and I doubt that wide-scale removal will have any noticeable impact here. To the extent that it's needed for mass communication, other techniques will be found. The mass text messages sent for Sandy are probably a good model there.

As far as the cost/benefit analysis, I imagine the radio costs in the neighborhood of $5-10 per car compared to not having one. I'd guess that the major expense is the cabling and routing for the antenna, rather than the actual receiver electronics. This is not a lot, but if people don't care, they might as well save the money. It makes more sense when you realize that there are literally a thousand ways to spend $5 to improve a car, but if you did them all, you'd end up with a car that cost $5,000 more.