The Great Automotive AM Radio War of 2023 rages on, with the news this week that Ford has capitulated, at least for now. You’ll recall that the opening salvo came when the US automaker declared that AM radio was unusable in their EV offerings thanks to interference generated by the motor controller. Rather than fixing the root problem, Ford decided to delete the AM option from their EV infotainment systems, while letting their rolling EMI generators just keep blasting out interference for everyone to enjoy. Lawmakers began rattling their sabers in response, threatening legislation to include AM radio in every vehicle as a matter of public safety. Ford saw the writing on the wall and reversed course, saying that AM is back for at least the 2024 model year, and that vehicles already delivered without it will get a fix via software update.
In other corporate oopsie news, HP has apparently borked a bunch of printers with a firmware update. The issue appears to go back to around May 8, and impacts OfficeJet 902x series printers. HP customer service reps seem to have been taken by surprise by this at first, telling people that the “83C0000B” error displayed on the locked-up screen on their printers was due to a print head problem. It didn’t take long to figure out that something had gone wrong with a firmware upgrade, but HP didn’t have much to offer by way of a solution. As of this writing, there still doesn’t appear to be a fix, so if you own one of these printers, you’re out of luck for now.
