Spotify’s Car Thing, the company’s limited hardware “trial” it only started shipping three years ago, is about to bite the dust. Company he wrote Without the device that brought Spotify to cars on Thursday Apple CarPlay or Android Autoas of December 9th, it will “no longer operate”.
Car thing designed for drivers who want to listen to Spotify in their cars but don’t have modern systems with built-in streaming apps. The $90 device let you control the service with voice recognition and preset buttons, and it had a four-inch color touchscreen. But Spotify was already there stopped By mid-2022.
In Our 2021 preview, Engadget’s Billy Steele wrote that the gadget seemed useless at first, but after two weeks of use it came in handy. “While it seems like only Spotify fans would be interested in something like this, it offers an upgrade for older cars,” wrote our audio expert. “I never include built-in volume control [the 2006 Honda] Being able to keep Element and Waze on my phone and Spotify on another display definitely reduced the need to fiddle with both while driving.”
Spotify’s official explanation for ditching its first hardware product is that it’s “part of our ongoing efforts to simplify our product offerings” (read: save money), allowing the streaming service to “focus on developing new features and improvements that , which is ultimately a better experience for all Spotify users.”
These new features and improvements are anyone’s guess, as the company adds that it has no plans to launch a replacement product or a new version of Car Thing. Of course, you can listen to Spotify in your car with your phone connected via Bluetooth or cable, and many drivers now have Android Auto and Apple CarPlay, which provide access to more than one music app.
Spotify recommends resetting Car Thing to factory settings and discarding it once it’s up and running in December. The company doesn’t offer any return or exchange options — something to keep in mind if experimenting with more limited hardware.
