Spotify wants you to trash your Car Thing

This probably isn’t much of a surprise after Spotify discontinued production of the Car Thing back in 2022, but the music streaming company has notified owners that they will be bricking the digital interface hardware on December 9, 2024.

All purchased Spotify Car Things will stop working, essentially becoming e-waste. Since the product is not open source, there's no way the community can keep it alive either.

As Spotify’s first foray into building their own hardware, the Car Thing launched in late 2021 to a limited range of subscribers, before seeing a wide release in early 2022. After barely spending any time on the market, Spotify began hosting fire sales of their inventory prior to stopping production a mere few months later.

Car Thing wasn’t a game changing device as it essentially served as a Bluetooth touch screen extension of the Spotify app for older vehicles, but if you purchased one during the sales, they were useful for some folks at a very low price tag. Still, this is a precautionary tale for supporting first endeavors from tech companies as nothing lasts forever in the tech world.