People in the internet-connected car device world have known this has been coming for a long time, so I don’t think this is exactly shocking news to most people, but as of yesterday, Spotify’s Car Thing music-playing device is now a useless chunk of plastic. The device was designed to allow cars without CarPlay or Android Auto or other such systems to easily access and play Spotify music in the car, in a way that’s easier than fumbling with the phone interface. It even included an actual knob! But it’s dead now. And everyone who bought one is now kind of screwed. But there’s hope!
Spotify introduced the device in February of 2022, and discontinued it in July of that same year, due to low demand, supply chain issues, and, I suspect, some executive’s whim, though they remained for sale. Here’s what Spotify told TechCrunch at the time:
“Based on several factors, including product demand and supply chain issues, we have decided to stop further production of Car Thing units. Existing devices will perform as intended. This initiative has unlocked helpful learnings, and we remain focused on the car as an important place for audio.”
Well, the part about the devices performing “as intended” ended yesterday, leaving many customers who actually liked using a device they paid $90 for out in the cold.
(image: Spotify)
Plenty of people are, of course, pissed, and seeing notices like these on their Car Thing screens isn’t helping:
As far as Spotify is concerned, here’s what you can do: throw it out.
From Spotify’s support site:
We recommend resetting your Car Thing to factory settings and safely disposing of your device following local electronic waste guidelines. Contact your state or local waste disposal department to determine how to dispose of or recycle Car Thing in accordance with applicable laws and regulations.
That’s great, thanks, Spotify, bang-up job. Way to go. You made the perfect product! Sell it, then tell people to throw it away! There is a way to apply to get a refund, but you only have until January 14, 2025 to do it. So, if you have one, you have about a month to not be screwed out of $90.
What’s especially maddening is that this thing didn’t have to be this way. Fundamentally, the Car Thing was just a Bluetooth device, and as such could have been something that just connected to the existing and still functional Spotify phone app and offered a new way to control that. The fact that this Car Thing has to access the internet independently seems absurd, in hindsight.
Inside, the Car Thing is a Linux-based computer and happily, people have been hacking them for some time now, so if you have one, there is hope. Here’s a video showing some of what can be done:
The Car Thing isn’t an especially capable computing platform, and it was definitely enough for the job it was intended to do, playing music. Clever people have developed entirely new software that restores all of its previous capabilities and beyond, but even with all this it’s not easy to restore its ability to run in a car, at least not with some supplemental computing help via a Rasberry Pi or something, because Spotify has not opened up any means for the Car Thing to connect to a phone running Spotify, which they could have. The bricking of all these devices was a design choice that Spotify made, and not necessarily an inherent limitation. It’s like this because that’s what Spotify wanted.
There’s a big takeaway here, a lesson that we’d do well to learn: don’t trust hardware that needs to call home to some server to work. At least not if you’d like to be the one who decides how and how long you get to use that hardware. This goes for systems built into car infotainment and other systems, too, and all those car feature-subscription services nobody wants.
We’ve already seen issues from Subarus that keep trying to access now-defunct 3G cellular networks and draining their own batteries in the process, and the future may certainly reveal more and more situations like these, where all manner of functionality is lost because some form of handshaking to a remote computer is no longer available.
Now is the time that we, as car owners, users, and lovers need to speak up and make it clear that we don’t want to buy things that some company can just suddenly decide won’t work anymore. The Spotify Car Thing is just a very public example of how this can happen, and I think we can all agree that it, you know, sucks.
This thing always seamed like it was trying to return to the time when people had Ipods and Zunes connected to their car with an FM transmitter like the good ol’ aught’s. I’m still trying to understand the usefulness beyond having a knob for navigation, and even that seamed to not be a useful way to navigate a music streaming app.
I was tempted to pick one of these up, as it would have been nice in my off-roaders to handle Spotify tasks while my phone handled OnX maps. In the end I decided I wasn’t quite so lazy that I couldn’t just let the phone take care of both, and I’m now glad I did seeing as how Spotify unnecessarily orphaned it. I still like the concept, though.
Not entirely related, but somewhat: Honda is quietly killing satellite radio in most of its cars now. I never really listened to radio, preferring my CD collection and later my mp3s, but SiriusXM — for all its flaws and compression — is still a seamless way to have “music that just works” in the car, regardless of who is driving, where the phone is, whether it’s paired, and regardless of cell signal or data plan. And yes, I mostly blame Spotify’s popularity for indirectly driving this decision.
Spotify is a trash company that goes out of their way to screw over the artists they profit off of.
https://weareumaw.org/justice-at-spotify
This is a great story and a good lesson Jason. Guess what device will never give you up like the Spotify Car thing? The Jatco Xtronic CVT and its smooth, shift-free driving experience will never let you down whether you’re looking for a comfortable and quiet cruise or a fast paced run around town. Best of all, it will never leave you deserted because it’s just so reliable.
I was three pages into the article before I realized that “Car Thing” was the actual name of the product.
This made me so mad I Spotifyed.
IMHO, any company that sells a device like this and bricks it in an unreasonably short time should be on the hook to refund the purchase price.
Of course, we live in the US, so that ain’t never gonna happen.
He mentioned they were offering refunds, which hopefully don’t require jumping through hoops and paying to ship the things back.
This company might, but so many don’t. It should be the law of the land. I don’t know what “reasonable” is for this sort of thing, but five years from date of purchase feels fair. Maybe a sliding scale based on how much it cost. I’d even be OK with it being somewhat pro-rated. Nothing lasts forever, but if I had bought the last one of these I would be a tad peeved.
And definitely no hoops. Anything like this is going to require a subscription, so they both know who their customers are and have the ability to put the cash right back on the credit card.
I’ve held onto and used computers, and smartphones longer than recommended, but it is a given that they are of finite usefulness. I will never buy a “software defined” to be subject to the same.
I feel much better now about my decision to no longer listen to music, podcasts, etc. Car time is quiet time now, and I like it.
I just listen to my own gigantic music library, or that old-fashioned thing called “radio”. I see zero need to pay to stream music from the Internet. I mostly listen to NPR in the car anyway.
Around my area I mostly just listen to the radio. However our cottage is in country music territory so I’m pretty happy to have spotify then. The subscription is worth it for the amount of surveying I do at work, approximately 140km of walking in a grid on one site this year. Music makes it much nicer. The long cottage drive music is just a bonus.
I have a 128Gb thumb drive full of my own music. I have no need to stream any even where there is no decent radio.
I see your thumb drive and raise you a Plex server on my home PC that I stream to my phone and car via PlexAmp and Android Auto.
(I do keep a selection of favorites on my phone for those rare times when I can’t get a signal).
I listen to my local community radio station while on long drives. The have an internet broadcast, so I connect it to my phone and phone to car. Bingo. KVMR is basically the only radio station I listen to.
“The Car Thing isn’t an especially capable computing platform, and it was definitely enough for the job it was intended to do, playing music.”
I have but one simple question. How much more powerful than The Autopain Mainframe is this Car Thing?
Yes.
Learnings not to trust tech companies.
Companies need to be fined for e-waste like this
I’m so sick of seeing this happen over and over and over. They absolutely should either have to pay to recycle them or be forced to open source it.
Its pretty amazing the number of things we buy basically as a license, not a transfer of title. Its like renting an apartment. Sure you can keep the keys, cuz they put new locks on anyway. Steam has been getting some serious grief over this recently, to the point they updated their language to actual state you are not buying a game, you are buying a license to play the game for as long as they choose to support it.
Pretty much any software sale is a license… Most certainly since digital sales were a thing, but I think even physical media is also technically a license.
Thankfully Valve seems to be in good financial shape; I’ve always wondered what would happen to my game licenses if they went out of business.
I have the same play lists since the 90s.
I don’t have any music subscriptions since I always listen to the same music anyways. The day or phones no longer play mp3s I’m screwed.
Nah, you will just transfer them to whatever the new hot format is. Just like we all ripped our CDs to MP3 (well, at least I did). And being the bad boy rebel that I am, after ripping my 1500+ CDs (I worked in a record/video store for YEARS) I *sold* them. Don’t tell the music mafia on me! And with modern computing power, it will take a LOT less time than it took me to rip all those CDs 15+ years ago.
I ripped all the songs I like from my CD’s circa 2003. All the CD’s are sitting on storage boxes in the corner of my bonus room; probably slowly succumbing to digital rot.
My oldest CD, AC/DC’s Who Made Who was starting to get a little dodgy 20 years ago when I ripped it. I guess the liner notes that told me it was manufactured to the highest quality standards and would last a lifetime when handled properly wasn’t true.
Obviously, you didn’t handle it properly! AKA with the finest kid gloves, in a climate-controlled listening room at the ideal temperature and static air pressure. 😉
But I do have a couple hundred classical music CDs that I never ripped (and so kept) that still play just fine after up to 35+ years. But they have been treated extremely lovingly, unlike the rock and pop CDs that spent YEARS rolling around in cars in many cases. I got my first home CD player in 1987, and my first car CD player in 1990 – those old CDs had seen some things… But only a couple out of 1500 didn’t rip, and one of them was one that a drunk roommate in college rubbed against a cinderblock wall… 3/4 of it still played ok.
The trouble with classical CDs is that 99% of the time there is no metadata for them, so ripping them doesn’t work out well, and many mp3 players didn’t handle gapless tracks well at all back in the day. And I never listened to them in the car or on the go anyway. Very much a “sit down with a glass of Port” sort of thing for me.
I actually did keep the very first CD I ever bought – Elton John’s Live in Australia concert album. Six months before I bought a CD player – a friend had one, so I copied it to a top-quality cassette with Dolby C. I had a few dozen CDs before I bought my first CD player. Those things were f’ing expensive in the ’80s! Both players and media!
Memories – I had a Yamaha receiver with a nice Yamaha tape deck and Boston Acoustics speakers that I bought my senior year of high school and took to college. Bought a Sony CD player with some leftover textbook money (don’t tell my folks) when Sears had a Black Friday sale. I still have that CD player in my garage in Maine, and I bet it still works fine, though I haven’t put a CD in it in a decade. I also still have the Sony clock radio that I bought at the same time for $10 – that still works too! I bought my first CD-writer in about 1997 – 2X SCSI. You didn’t dare breath near it when doing it’s thing, lest you make a $16 coaster. But I still have a couple of mix CDs I made with that – and they still play too!
Store discs vertically, not horizontally. Gravity eventually separates the shiny bit that stores the data away from the plastic part if you store them flat.
I’ve had to rip my collection several times. Much smaller than yours, but every time I got more space I went to a higher bitrate until FLAC (and the required storage space) was an option.
Is the Spotify phone app that terrible to use? (I don’t spotify)
If they made the UI for the car thing, seems like they could replicate the controls and layout in their app. And since a phone has bluetooth and seems to be around the same size and shape of the car thing it seems like there’s already a replacement available.
It’s decent enough when it’s in car mode, but the Car Thing does have a few advantages:
I’ve never used a Car Thing before but I always was intrigued by it and thought there could be some potential with the hardware if it wasn’t so limited (for obvious reasons) to Spotify.
I usually listen to podcast while driving, so I don’t switch tracks very often. I do us a magnetic mount that can hold my phone in portrait or landscape and I usually leave it on landscape – which allows me to see full track names if I am scrolling for something.
I also have physical volume knobs still. I sought that feature out specifically in my last 2 cars. I realize they were hard to come by for a while, but they seem to be coming back.
There is this thing that is a BT receiver with a volume knob.
https://www.amazon.com/NVX-Universal-Controller-Motorcycles-XUBT3/dp/B015XLMLQQ/ref=sr_1_11?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.XQ53R-HK6_w_AeG9Qo-5abVahnr2IuZj0EEX6_LQRcXlAbDAPqo7-Z3jr5tMCiTmtk89uAybvGalYSD-K5InY9UB0p_8sAe3m32lLkgdOV7PzrMntxTc_MgeW3L4z9gdPYnTD9MMcpF44WppYHRgsBiiELNpkL7myFn9ffA_nFM9oF1v1hByTmWDicdLQjncSKXy-xVhpEfCm-X_urXVA21GEdJ_prs4CIWGH1ADCm0.ClwpJReNESUEhAaNF6v4_-K0EvGFaHNQRgZAZ_BX3fw&dib_tag=se&keywords=bluetooth%2Breceiver%2Bwith%2Bvolume%2Bcontrol&qid=1733946050&sr=8-11&th=1
Biggest complaint I have with Spotify is either their laziness, or my lack of knowledge, of making it easy to play specific genres of music from your liked songs.
I think it’s pretty easy to use.
*Smugly inserts cassette into the deck of his ’99 Corolla and jams to Zeppelin II*
*deck eats tape*
My LAST VW did that. It also choked on a CD rendering my in dash stereo a radio only experience.
Hasn’t happened yet, in fact I bought that Zeppelin II cassette back in middle school. But boy is buying used cassettes these days a fuckin’ GAMBLE. That Chicago cassette I bought sounds like they’re playing under water. Total waste of like $3.
Troglodyte, CDs are where it’s at!
Yes, borrow them from public library, rip onto home PC, transfer into phone, return CDs to library.
I still have a Denon dual deck CD burner to make the copies I keep in my truck.
I originally read that as “…CD burner I keep in my trunk” and was wow, you’re the Jim Rockford of music conversion!
HA! Now that would be something!
It’s like Pirate Bay but less convenient.
That’s what I use in my ’06 Sierra. But I drove the Corolla today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iW4Gdsnr2Bg