Wohnort reports that Service Following tests are taking place until the end of the year.

However, I wonder how much of this will trickle down into the real world.

Judging by these pathetic lies from Mitsubishi, not very much !

Mitsubishi Motors monitor news on the digital radio switchover and are waiting for a confirmed switch over date. The current proposed date is 2015.

Currently major audio equipment manufacturers do not support digital and others only produce 'dash-top' boxes that send the signal to your normal car radio via a FM frequency.

Most motor manufacturers including Mitsubishi are awaiting a confirmed switch over date before action is taken on implementing DAB radios into vehicles.

Please keep checking media reports for estimates of when the changeover will take place.

http://www.mitsubishi-cars.co.uk/faq.aspx (Technical)

http://www.mitsubishi-cars.co.uk/outlander/models.aspx
Although the Outlander now has DAB fitted?

'You can browse tens of radio stations with the obsolescent DAB digital radio system offering mostly low quality mono...'

FTFY !

The radio display also looks very odd, showing tracks and stations that seem to be USA based, where there's no DAB.

Mitsubishi don't seem to know whether they're coming or going.

Taking a look at the Mitsubishi website sheds a bit more light on it. The ASX looks to be a "Focus sized" car. The basic 2-wheel drive models have an AM/FM radio as standard, whereas the ASX4 variants have a DAB radio.

But they are no longer radios - they are multimedia systems with in-built satnav, Bluetooth, and mobile phone connectivity, mostly controlled from the steering wheel. The 4-wheel drive ASX4 have DAB by virtue of having a Kenwood multimedia unit.

The manufacturer nowadays doesn't fit radios that slot into a standard hole in the dashboard. The radios are an integral part of the dashboard, and it is a major headache for the manufacturers to decide what features to include or leave out of something that has a life expectancy of between 5 and 10 years ( after that, they become the family's second car ).

So the difficulty that Mitsubishi have is in judging the market requirements for the first few years of the car's life. Let's face it - the Government and the radio industry aren't really being a great deal of help in making that an easy decision in the UK.

A few months ago, the BBC business correspondent Peter Day covered the subject in one of his business programmes on the World Service. He talked to the man at Ford who had to decide what radio to fit in the latest Fiesta ( the one that looks like a rat from the front... ). He said that it was a total and utter headache to make that decision, worth millions of pounds despite being a small part of the car's production.

The first solution would be for it to be the norm that customers themselves could make the choice to change the multimedia unit if they wanted to.

A second solution, one which I've said before here, is that radios have to become soft-centred - that they all have to become SDR ( software defined radios ), so that the same circuit board goes into every car throughout the world. Depending upon the locality, frequencies and modulation can be changed just by altering the firmware in the radio ( computer ) board. This will also be great in that it will end recycling or dumping to landfill. So why aren't we doing it ? Lethargy ? A desire to kill the planet ?

Cars are awful things anyway in almost every respect.

I don't know about the latest model, but my Focus has a Double DIN slot. It would be far better if cars were sold without radios, giving buyers the freedom to fit exactly what they wanted. The last thing I'd want to do with a new car would be to start by having to extract the factory fitted rubbish and replace it !

Worst of all would be an expensive, too-clever-by-half multi-media job with a radio that lacked DAB/LW combined with a fixed satnav lacking the lifetime free maps and lifetime free TPEG traffic alerts that my standalone unit already has.

One size fits all just doesn't work any more; it's becoming quite a show stopper.

I notice that new low cost multiplatform SDR chipsets by Frontier Silicon and others are on the way soon which will help getting digital radio in the car.
Also the boss of Frontier Silicon is chairman of the worlddmb and giving updates on digital radio like this one at the IBC which ideally reps from the main carmakers should attend to get up to date info.
http://www.worlddab.org/system/news/....7.2014_v2.pdf
and have included hybrid IP and DAB+/FM systems

>"DAB is fitted as standard in 90% of new vehicles sold in the UK."

Yeah, right.

Which planet is he on ?

Or what is he on ?

Should be 50%, maybe a typo?
http://www.thedrum.com/news/2014/07/...rsonalised-ads

but I remember they were trying to get 100% by 2013 back in 2009 so that target was not met.
http://www.techradar.com/news/audio/...by-2013-609056

I assume that text is a couple of years old.

Since then manufacturer such as Audi, BMW, Citroen, Fiat, Ford, Honda, Jaguar, Land Rover, Lexus, Lotus, Mercedes, Mini, Mitsubishi, Peugeot, Porsche, Seat, Skoda, Toyota, Vauxhall, Volkswagen and Volvo have introduced DAB car radios either standard or as option. Mitsubishi have recently been added to that list so I assume they still need to update their FAQ.

I'd say the majority of manufacturers have been offering DAB car radios for quite a while now.


Yes, that's not correct. I don't expect the 90% to be reached until next year. It was 55% in April this year so it will be around 60% now and probably reaching about 80% by the end of the year. It is not very easy to predict as it's only linear if you zoom out a lot. On a month-by-month basis it can jump quite a bit when another manufacturer announces DAB as standard across all models.

I have been looking at DAB in car statistics for a while now and it is not very straightforward to base a prediction on.

Firstly, there is uneven distribution among brands. BMW fits 100% of their cars with DAB, VW 89%, Audi 88%, Ford 77% but Vauxhall and Mercedes are around 60%. Obviously, if (hypothetically speaking) 25% of all Fiats come with DAB and 100% of all Lotuses, Fiat will still make a bigger dent because of their sales volume. Overall it seems we are currently in the middle of an S-curve with numbers increasing more rapidly than ever. However, this will at some point plateau again because we may never reach 100% of all cars to come with DAB.

Then new car sales per year. After a slump caused by the prolonged recession, car sales have seen a spectacular recovery with increasing sales per year. 2013 saw higher sales than 2012 and 2014 will probably exceed 2013. That means that 50% of new cars with DAB in 2013 is not the same amount of cars as 50% in 2014.

Distribution throughout the year is also uneven with sales concentrating around plate changes. 440.000 cars with DAB radio were sold in the first four months of 2014. However, you can't just triple that figure to get 1.32 million new cars with DAB in 2014 because the summer months will see fewer car sales while there will be another spike in September for the second plate change. Whether a manufacturer goes 100% DAB in August or October makes a big difference for the absolute numbers because of that September sales spike. If tomorrow Vauxhall announces DAB in 100% of their cars suddenly all my predictions have been too conservative.

My conservative estimate for this year is that 1 million new cars with DAB will be added to the UK's roads. What does that mean for the installed base? There were 35 million licensed vehicles on Britain's road last year (about 28 million of them being cars). This number is largely stable as the 1.5% increase in 2013 was the biggest increase since 2007. The era of car-ownership-as-a-matter-of-course has come to an end. With the total amount of cars roughly stable it means that many of these new cars are not adding to the UK's roads but replacing another that is taken off the roads. I expect 2015 will see about 2 million cars with DAB sold (about 90% of about 2.4 million new cars).

If I'd take a wild guess I'd say 1.5 million cars with DAB were sold prior to 2014 (and half of those probably in 2013). Add to that my expectation of 1 million in 2014 and we'll reach 2.5 million at the end of this year. Add my predicted 2 million for 2015 and we'll reach 4.5 million by the end of next year. Obviously, these are only factory-fitted DAB radios and it excludes the aftermarket with companies such as Halfords who have announced they will stop selling analogue-only radios soon.

But, as a caveat, while the current numbers are clear, because of the many factors that are constantly varying it is very hard to predict anything further than a year out with a decent reliability.

It just occurred to me that there is an assumption that cars represent a significant part of our radio listening, so I did a bit of searching online.

According to this article around 20% of radio listening is done in cars, a significant amount but very much the minority compared with listening at home (65%). Of people who listen to the radio, 61% listen in the car, again a significant percentage but also smaller than one might expect.

Given that around 90% of people in the Rajar sample say they listen to the radio, then roughly 55% of that sample listen in the car. Again, that is a significant proportion - but maybe not as many as we might expect.

And it means that logically, around 45% of the population does not listen to the radio in the car.

I know Nissan say they will not offer DAB radios as standard until "it becomes industry standard". If the list of manufacturers shown in one of the posts above is true then it seems DAB is becoming a de facto standard.

Some Nissan Qashqai models now have NissanConnect which includes DAB as standard.
http://www.autotrader.co.uk/articles...ost-from-17595

Good item by Adam Bowie, who sadly has left Absolute, but for Absolute/Bauer getting DAB, or internet radio, in cars is important as it will be a step to closing the expensive to now run 1215AM mono transmitter network "currently in the millions of pounds" and ""could be the first radio group to choose to switch off a national analogue signal" according to http://www.mediaweek.co.uk/article/1...-am-switch-off

I think for many car manufacturers the scale of the market will have played a role too. As Phil Dodd already mentioned, designing a car radio is not trivial. If you then have to invest that money in designing a radio that is only really useful in the UK and Denmark it becomes very expensive.

However, now so many other countries have switched on DAB/DAB+ (including all of the EU5 countries) in recent years, the same radio can be sold across many markets across Europe. It is no coincidence that many manufacturers didn't jump on it until Germany switched on DAB+.

It was always going to take Germany for car manufacturers to finally go with DAB. This will be the biggest single change to secure the future of DAB. Sorry to disappoint the haters but it'll be around for some time now.....

"There's absolutely no point in making cars with the steering wheels on the right and speedometers marked in miles per hour, there's only one country in the world where we could ever sell them..."

What if you exclude those who never or rarely use a car (either as driver or passenger)? How do you count someone who listens to the radio on their personal device while taking a taxi?

Bad analogy I am afraid. Japan and many ex British colonies e.g. India, Australia etc. all drive on the left. Admittedly they don't necessarily use miles.

It's a very good analogy.

Only the UK drives on the left and has speed limits in miles per hour.

I think BMW has a standard headend and can plug different modules like DAB/DAB+, mobile phone/tunein http://www.bmw.com/com/en/owners/bmw...3/apps/tunein/ or XM Sirius. But the next generation of chipsets will be software upgradable to any current or new standard as well as being cheaper.

You are right that the UK is the only country that drives on the left AND still uses MPH. However, the difference between DAB and Left Hand Drive is fairly large for a manufacturer.

Not supporting Left Hand Drive and MPH means you won't have a realistic mass market in the UK. (And some brands such as Lancia left the UK market in the 90's because it became too expensive). Not supporting DAB two years ago meant that your customers couldn't listen to all UK radio stations in their car. I doubt many people will base their buying of a car on the radio it comes with so the impact on car sales will have been minimal.

How could it be a hard decision as to what type of car radio to put in?

It should be
DAB/DAB+/FM/AM ideally with LW too, it should have Aux In, Bluetooth to take phone calls wirelessly/SD Card/USB for MP3. No dilemma there, miss any of those features and it's instantly a crap stereo, include them all in and it's not, it's as simple as that.
Them putting in FM/AM radios only sometimes not even with an aux socket is criminal. How can it be considered a luxurious modern car with the brand new stereo not even including DAB which despite its flaws is essentially now the current technology for radio broadcasting.


The future could also be internet radio, a car stereo could come with access to 3G, and online radio stations could be given a 4 digit code that could be inputted on the front of the car stereo where it would go and retrieve the stream. Eg 3251 for ReachOnAir for example, that would stop the inevitable faff that comes with trying to tune internet radio on the move, ie using the TuneIn Radio app which doesn't try hard enough to reconnect if the stream is dropped for my liking.

Radio station choice was much worse with just FM, it's fairly fun to have DAB in car, listening to Asian music on BBC Asian Network, oldies on Magic, a war veterans story on BFBS, BBC Radio 4 Extra with many classic comedies and good Radio 4 content/Wirral Radio now with much better coverage/getting 80's or 90's music only on Absolute 80's and 90's, it doesn't have quite enough choice in terms of what could actually be othered, but it's still a lot better than FM.

One feature I have never seen on a car radio is a Bluetooth out connection to allow you to listen using Bluetooth earphones. Useful if you are a multidrop delivery driver trying to listen to the cricket and don't want to miss a wicket.

The switch to DAB in car radios reminds me of the switch to FM in previous decades. By the mid seventies the majority of household radios had FM, but most car radios still came fitted with MW and LW, the argument given that FM reception was patchy in many areas and the nation's most popular radio station broadcast mostly on MW. It took another ten years for FM to be fitted to the majority of car radios and not until the end of the eighties when non FM radios were deleted.