Radio in this case meaning an analog signal. Just fire the appropriate good vibes energy at the car rather than trying to send some packets over a wireless network. It didn't work mostly due to the lack of any kind of redundancy. If a packet got dropped then it just dropped, it was gone.

When we started adding some decent protocols to Bluetooth it became more reliable, but it's still not great range because of the frequencies used. Of course these days you would use Wi-Fi not analog radio, to get all of the advantages of Bluetooth but a much greater range and reliability.