Spotify Officially Shuts Down Car Thing, Remaining Devices Stop Working

As announced earlier this year, the Spotify Car Thing is dead, with all devices officially offline as of today.

Spotify launched the Car Thing in 2022 as its first device. A simple screen with a rotating dial and a few buttons could connect to your phone and your car to give you a better way to control your music. However, less than a year after the device went on sale, Spotify announced that it would discontinue the device and stop selling it. Just two years after that, Spotify also announced that it would discontinue existing devices, at one point literally telling users to throw away their devices.

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

Earlier today, Spotify Car Thing owners began noticing that their devices had stopped working. We saw reports via Twitter/X, with the device now booting up to display a message stating that the device is “no longer working” and reiterating the refund terms, with the window for which ends in January.

Car Thing has been discontinued and is no longer working.

Thank you for being with us on this journey, have a safe trip. For more information, visit carthing.com. Please contact customer service no later than January 14, 2025 to discuss your refund options.

Image: John Schwabisch

Just because Spotify ripped out the core framework that made the Car Thing work doesn't mean the device is completely useless, as efforts are being made to build new capabilities on the hardware that don't rely on Spotify's backend. The extremely low power of the hardware prevents it from being used effectively to run Android, but some clever solutions have been found thanks to the open source files Spotify released a while back.

RIP Car Thing. You were cool, even if you were pretty useless.