why older cars need long extendable antennas for radio reception, while modern cars often only have little stumps on the top but still good reception

Question

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In: Technology

Answer 1

Because you can’t bury a radio antenna in the body of a steel car, but you can hide it behind plastic.

As others have pointed out, the little antenna that you see is for features that the older car didn’t even have, but that would use a stumpy antenna if you did add them. (Source: Worked for a company called Antenna Specialists that made cell phone antennas in the mid-1990s.)

The AM/FM radio in your newer car is still a long thin piece of metal but now it can be hidden within some plastic or glass part of the car, because there’s a lot more knowledge now about how to make effective antennas and also because the percentage of plastic in cars is much higher nowadays.