Car designers and engineers have much to answer for, but their latest deviance might be the most egregious yet.

The Ford Motor Co. announced recently that it will not install AM radios in most of its 2024 models.

AM radio can seem anachronistic, I’ll concede — conjuring images of vacuum tubes and a single tinny speaker contained within a wooden cabinet about as heavy as a Sherman tank and which, once placed in the corner of the living room, will not budge unless there’s a tornado.

But the AM dial’s association with the automobile dates back nearly a century, as the first entertainment device widely installed in vehicles. Its looming demise — carmakers are inveterate followers of trends, so I doubt Ford will long stand alone — saddens me, and not only because I’m nostalgic.

Ford’s explanation for its decision was predictable, and not without reason.

A spokesperson pointed out that many AM stations stream their content through the internet or via mobile apps or satellite.

“Ford will continue to offer these alternatives for customers to hear their favorite AM radio music, news and podcasts,” the spokesperson said.

That might mollify drivers who rarely venture far from a city with reliable internet signals.

But in Eastern Oregon there are great expanses — including places where people sometimes drive — which lie beyond the reach of that digital umbilical.

(Satellite radio is an exception, but it’s hardly ubiquitous.)

When you venture into this land of mountains and canyons and sagebrush plains that extend far beyond the horizon, a car radio can be the lone technological link, more trustworthy than cellular networks.

And among terrestrial radio, AM can also be the more accessible format — especially at night when its signals, which “bounce” off the atmosphere in a way that FM signals do not, tend to boast a much greater range.

If you take a trip across the AM spectrum after dark while driving through Baker County you’re apt to pull in stations from Canada and from Los Angeles, although those distant stations tend to shift frequently between clarity and useless static.

Many of my favorite memories as a fan of the University of Oregon football team (and an alumnus of the school) wouldn’t have happened but for the AM radio in my rig.

During the 1990s, when the Ducks, after two decades of general futility, were becoming a perennial contender for a bowl bid, far fewer football games were televised (these days, all of them are). Because no local station broadcast Oregon football then, I usually had to drive to Elkhorn Summit, near Anthony Lakes, to pull in KUMA, an AM station from Pendleton.

Even with cellphones and internet streaming as well as universal TV coverage, I have as recently as a couple years ago listened to Duck football on AM radio while camping at Dixie Butte, where my phone was useless for that purpose.

Although I don’t expect to be in the market for a new car for many years, I suspect that if I were comparing models the absence of an AM radio could prove decisive.

(Unlike, for instance, the complement of cupholders or the number of USB charging ports, neither of which is particularly important to me.)

The money managers at car companies — known as “bean counters,” a term of derision rather than respect — no doubt can pin to the penny per vehicle the savings from deleting the AM dial.

But I doubt the amount is significant — not when the average price of a new vehicle tops $40,000.

The disdain among automakers for allegedly outdated technology is hardly confined to the stereo system. As anyone knows who has owned or sat in a vehicle built within the past five years or so, interiors are lousy with touch screens and multifunction dials and buttons with haptic feedback.

(Apparently drivers have a strong desire, until recently unfulfilled, to receive a small shock, as if they had touched a low-voltage fence wire, when they want to set the cruise control or switch on the air conditioning.)

Automakers boast of how many functions they can cram into a single screen.

This might be desirable, and sensible, if the screen were in your home. I wouldn’t mind being able to turn on the dishwasher, for instance, while reclining on my sofa and reading a magazine.

But a car is different.

Or at least we used to recognize that unlike a home, which poses little risk to pedestrians, a vehicle can, in an instant of inattention by the driver, become a deadly missile.

Yet the car companies with each new model seem to give drivers more reasons to look somewhere other than toward whatever they’re about to run into or over.

The design that had become the standard decades ago is elegant and not easily improved on — three separate dials, placed next to each other, one operating the temperature, one the fan speed and one selecting which vents the chilled or heated air issues from.

Although there are variations on the placement and design of these knobs, owners quickly master the layout, and once done they can manipulate these frequently used accessories without diverting their eyes from the windshield.

The screens that infest vehicles these days perform the same functions, but the process, lacking the tactile and instinctive sensation of twisting a dial, can never be as intuitive.

By the time a driver has navigated the menus and submenus to perform the simplest task, he might have driven through a fence or over a hapless cyclist, scarcely noticing, in his exasperation, the brief thump or final cry of surprise and pain.

But at least they’ll no longer have to worry about navigating the AM dial.