The Rivian R2 Drops FM Radio for iHeartRadio

The R2 does not come with a regular AM or FM tuner. What you get instead is iHeartRadio built right into the car, and that app streams thousands of live local AM and FM stations over the internet for free. So your local stations are still there. You are just pulling them down over a data connection now instead of off an antenna stuck to the roof.

I have watched a fair number of people online react to this like Rivian snuck something out of the car on them, and I understand it. Losing a feature never feels great, even one you had forgotten you had. But when I asked Rivian about FM usage on the R1, the number they came back with was in the single digits. And that lines up with what I see from owners. Nobody I know is flipping over to the FM tab when Spotify and Tidal are sitting right there, and the Assistant is turning into the thing people reach for now anyway.

There is a money side to this too, and it is not nothing. No tuner means no antenna, so that little shark fin on the roof goes away along with the hardware feeding it. When you are trying to land a vehicle at $44,990, the small parts savings are kind of the whole game. They add up in a way that is easy to wave off from the outside.

On paper iHeart is not even a step down. It is free, no subscription, and it gives you the live local broadcast stations plus podcasts and its own digital stuff. If your usual morning station is in there, and most of them are, you tap it and it sounds the same as it always did.

The R2 comes loaded with a pretty full set of apps already. Apple Music, Spotify, TIDAL, TuneIn, and Audible are in there now, and SiriusXM is coming in a later update along with Amazon Music and YouTube Music. So it is not really a tuner being traded for one app. It is a tuner being traded for basically every way you already listen to music, and iHeart is just sitting in the mix to handle the local broadcast side. Most of those apps run on the same data connection iHeart needs, which is the part I keep wanting to come back to.

Because that is where I get a little less relaxed about it than Rivian probably is. The stream needs data. Most of the time you will never think about that. The car is online, everything works, you move on. But people take Rivians off grid. Down a forest road, out to the spot with no bars, the kind of place the R2 was sort of built for. That is exactly where a plain old FM tuner keeps playing and iHeart does not. Losing your radio out in the middle of nowhere, in the vehicle you bought partly to get to the middle of nowhere, is a fair thing to be a little annoyed about.

The emergency stuff lands in the same spot. AM especially still carries weather and road condition broadcasts in rural areas, and that has pulled people out of bad situations before. Now you are counting on cell coverage for that too, and cell coverage is the thing that tends to vanish right when you would actually want it.

I do want to be straight about the wider picture though, because that single digit number is a Rivian number, not the whole country. Radio is still huge in the car overall. Edison Research had over the air AM/FM sitting around 55% of in-car listening time this year, well ahead of streaming. It has been sliding a little every year, sure, but it is a long way from gone. Rivian owners just lean way harder toward streaming than the average driver does, so the thing that is true for this crowd is not true everywhere.

For most people buying an R2, this is just not going to be a big deal. You will open iHeart once or twice out of curiosity and then go right back to your playlists like everybody else. For the smaller group who actually live on broadcast radio, especially out where there is no coverage, it is a real tradeoff and I am not going to talk around it.