Spotify Car Thing

» see carthing.spotify.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

spotify car thing was a small touchscreen dongle for cars. a four-inch screen with a click-wheel and four shortcut buttons. usb-c for power. it ran a custom spotify ui showing your playlists and a now-playing screen with a big seek bar. you mounted it on the dashboard or the vent. it did one thing. it controlled spotify on the phone in your pocket over bluetooth.

the limited beta went out to invited premium subscribers in april 2021 at no cost. the public release came in february 2022 at 89.99 dollars. by july 2022 spotify had quietly stopped production, citing supply chain issues and weak demand. the remaining inventory was discounted to 25 dollars to clear it out. by the end of 2022 the device was officially discontinued.

the harder kill came on may 23 2024. spotify emailed every customer that car thing service would end on december 9 2024 and that the device would become inoperable on that date. the email recommended customers "dispose of the device", which is a corporate way of saying throw it away. a class action followed within days. spotify started offering refunds for purchases made directly through spotify.com. on december 9 2024 every car thing in every car bricked itself on schedule. internal filings later showed the project had cost spotify roughly 31.4 million dollars in writedowns.

in 2022 i was in ankara working on edge computer vision for drones, driving a car older than the car thing was supposed to control. the device was a north american premium-spotify exclusive. it never shipped in turkey at retail. its target customer was the san francisco premium subscriber with a recent toyota and an iphone. i watched the discontinuation arc from a distance, the way you watch someone buy a smart home gadget you would never bother with.

~ the record ~

~ the short life ~

car thing was technically a smart bluetooth remote, not a streaming device. the actual audio came from your phone over a separate bluetooth or aux connection. the touchscreen ran a stripped-down spotify ui with voice control via "hey spotify". the hardware was made by spotify's own internal team in stockholm. it shipped with no developer api and no support for any other audio service.

~ what really happened ~

spotify could have open-sourced the firmware or released a final patch to let community builds keep the device alive. either would have spared 100 thousand bricked dashboards from going to landfill. instead it shipped a remote kill switch and pushed it. the official reason in the email was that "the technology to keep car thing connected requires regular maintenance and we're focusing on building new features". the unofficial reason was probably that the hardware cost too much to support for a product line spotify had walked away from two years earlier.

some owners pried open their bricked units and flashed open-source firmware. there is a small community keeping car things running as raspberry-pi-style displays for non-spotify uses. spotify never blocked them. for the average customer though, december 9 was the end.

~ the funny part ~

spotify launched a much better version of car thing the same year it killed the original. the spotify mobile app added a dedicated car mode, and apple carplay and android auto already covered the use case better than a separate dashboard dongle ever could. the product spotify killed was a remote control for spotify. the product that took over was spotify itself running in carplay. there was no replacement to ship. there was just no longer any reason for the dongle to exist.

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