Yeah, the power is one reason I'm considering it. I've seen some good comments on Eham about it's noise blanker, but it's also a fairly old design, which is probably why the price is dropping. 50 watts of AM carrier would be nice, especially with the low efficiency of most mobile antennas. You need all you can get.
My experience with AM on the TS2000 is that it can sound pretty good with a good mike, hopefully the 480 is as good.
We did a little rough testing last night by parking my car next to my buddy's with a TS480HX, and running an antenna cable across. At the moment I don't have a resonant antenna on it, just a 3 foot whip for listening with. And there was a fair bit of ignition noise, and the noise blanker helped, but in AM mode didn't totally remove it. But maybe enough to be usable. I don't know if things would be better with a resonant antenna and more signal, or whether the S/N ratio would stay about the same since it would bring in more spark noise. I haven't looked into common mode chokes yet to see if some of the noise is being picked up on the coax, that remains to be explored.
Wish I knew how to reduce the spark noise in a coil over plug arrangement. Doesn't look like a lot of options to get in there and make a difference. So I may need to carefully choose a receiver that can really deal with what's there with the noise blanker.
Thanks for the comment!