Spotify officially kills Car Thing, remaining units have stopped working

2 weeks ago 4

As announced earlier this year, Spotify Car Thing is dead, with all units having officially been disabled as of today.

Spotify launched Car Thing in 2022 as its first piece of hardware. The simple screen with a rotating dial and a few buttons was able to connect to your phone and your car to give you a better way to control music. Less than a year after it went on sale, though, Spotify announced that it would discontinue the device and end sales. A mere two years after that, Spotify further announced that it would cease operation of existing devices, at one point literally telling users to throw away their units.

Now, as expected, the death of Spotify Car Thing has arrived.

Earlier today, Spotify Car Thing owners started to notice that their devices stopped working. We’ve seen reports via Twitter/X, with the device now booting up to display a message saying that the device is “no longer operational” and reiterating refund terms, the window for which ends in January.

Car Thing is discontinued and no longer operational.

Thanks you for being on this journey with us, safe travels. For more information, visit carthing.com. Contact customer service by no later than January 14, 2025 to discuss your refund options.

Just because Spotify has ripped out the underlying foundation that made Car Thing work doesn’t mean the device is entirely useless, as there are several efforts to create new experiences on this hardware that aren’t reliant on Spotify’s back end. The extremely low power of the hardware prevents it from being used to run Android effectively, but there have been some clever solutions thanks to the open-source files that Spotify released a while back.

RIP Car Thing. You were cool, even though you were pretty pointless.