The Rivian R2 Drops FM Radio for iHeartRadio

R2 Interior

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.

16 Comments

  1. I don’t like this. I get saving money, but the local news/weather/traffic station is on my FM radio every time as soon as I sit in *any* car. Don’t need another streaming service playing ads over-top of when I want to hear the traffic report or glitching the stream because the data signal is weak, for example.

    I get that I’ll need to learn to live without FM radio someday. Just like how my wife won’t buy any new car because she’s not ready to give up her CD player yet. But this definitely knocks my opinion on this vehicle down a notch.

    I will continue to keep my emergency AM/FM/Shortwave/Weather radio in every vehicle I own for emergencies.

    • Why would you need a radio-based traffic report when the map shows you traffic in real time? Perhaps you haven’t experienced a car with a modern, native navigation map before?

  2. I’m not going to defend this choice by Rivian. But probably in the very long term (eg 2-3 years from now), cars will have satellite access, so this gap goes away. In fact weather/emergency services will probably start going through satellite – better coverage in remote areas, and no need for local radio transmitter stations.

  3. This is probably a dealbreaker for me. My wife listens to our local NPR station and iHeart does not carry that station.

  4. I might be missing something, but if you’re frequently taking a vehicle off-road and off-grid, wouldn’t you already be carrying a portable emergency radio anyway? While it’s certainly not ideal to lose a built-in feature when spending this much on a new car, having a standalone backup seems like it would be a standard practice for remote travel. For most buyers, trading the physical tuner to help hit that $45k price point seems like a worthwhile compromise.

    • @KaMar you are close to the correct answer. If someone truly wishes to go off grid, you really should invest in a satellite communicator. For one, when I take our Rivian into the wild, I don’t plan to just sit in the car the whole time – so I would need it anyway. Now, I am one that still uses the FM for my local NPR. And my initial emotional reaction to this the loss of FM is annoyance. But practically speaking, people who go off grid should be properly prepared to be off grid. Relying on cellular coverage and FM coverage is not the modern standard for backup safety communication. This is evolving since many phones now have built in satellite capacity as well. And if you are in the wild, do you need traffic info?

  5. How does using iHeartRadio work with Connect+ then? Included or not? It seems harsh to put “FM” radio behind a paywall.

  6. How do you listen to podcasts in your Rivian? Is it a decent UX in iHeartRadio? I’m used to the Apple Podcast app but willing to make a change if it’s good enough.

  7. This is a deal braker for me. Google how much it cost a manufacturer to add a n fm receiver in a car and you get this answer: ”It costs a car company less than $5.00 USD total to physically add a basic, hardware-level FM radio receiver to a modern vehicle. ”

    So Rivian decided to save 5$ – 10$ in parts AND it forces me to pay the connect + package 15$ USD (20$ CAD) /month in order to listen to the radio. That is GREED. I will not pay for the connect + package as in northern Canada or other remote areas I go to, reception will be non existant whereas FM radio signals will reach the area.

    This is such a bad decision. I think most people don’t realize this at this time. This is just another way to milk more money and force people to pay for a subscription. I’m really disappointed in Rivian right now. Here was a company i believed in, finally a Tesla competitor, but not any longer.

    I guess I might as well wait for some other EVs, hopefully the chinese EVs coming to Canada won’t be that cheap.

    If someone can discuss this with RJ, please do so. I want my FM radio.

  9. “iHeartRadio… streams thousands of live local AM and FM stations over the internet for free. So your local stations are still there”

    iHeartRadio has VERY few Phoenix stations. Sad.

  10. How about someone making an aftermarket AM/FM receiver that can be added to the Rivian infotainment center?

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