The encyclopedia · Software & IT · Product decision · 2021–2022
Spotify's Car Thing — a $31M gadget that needed the phone it was supposed to replace
Spotify spent $31.4M on Car Thing — a touchscreen accessory for playing Spotify in the car. It required a phone, had no navigation, and was dead in 15 months.
Spotify · 2021-04-13
What happened
In April 2021 Spotify launched Car Thing — a 4-inch touchscreen device designed to sit on a car dashboard and control Spotify playback. It had a rubber knob, five preset buttons, and voice controls ('Hey Spotify'). The catch: Car Thing required both a Spotify Premium subscription and the user's phone nearby to stream music. It did not have GPS navigation, its own cellular connection, or any functionality beyond controlling Spotify.
Initially offered free to waitlisted Premium subscribers, Car Thing went on general sale in February 2022 at $89.99. Critics panned it: the interface was awkward, the components felt cheap, and the core question — why buy a $90 device to do what your phone already does? — went unanswered. Supply chain issues and low consumer interest compounded the problem.
In July 2022 — just 15 months after the initial launch and 5 months after going on general sale — Spotify ended production. The company took a $31.4 million charge on the hardware. In December 2024, Spotify bricked all remaining Car Things, ending support entirely. A class-action lawsuit followed.
Why it happened
- Car Thing solved a problem that did not exist — users already controlled Spotify from their phone, and the device required a phone anyway, adding no new capability
- Spotify entered hardware without a hardware strategy: the device had no navigation, no cellular data, no unique features that a phone mount could not match for free
- At $89.99 it was priced for a mass market that never materialized — few Premium subscribers wanted to pay extra for a single-purpose accessory
- The company had no plan for long-term hardware support, leaving early adopters with a bricked device two years later
The lesson
If your hardware requires the device it could have run on, the hardware is a dongle, not a product. A dongle does not justify its own supply chain.
Aftermath
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek later said 'we don't want to be a hardware company.' The Car Thing was Spotify's first and only in-house hardware product. The $31.4 million loss was small relative to Spotify's revenue but became a widely-cited example of the dangers of hardware-as-feature — building a physical product where a software feature (or nothing) would have sufficed. The class-action lawsuit was pending as of 2025.
Sources
- Wikipedia — Car Thing (Spotify hardware; launched April 2021; $31.4M write-off; discontinued July 2022; bricked December 2024)
- The Verge — Spotify is refunding Car Thing owners before bricking their devices
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