Spotify launches Car Thing, a smart player for your car
Car Thing, the custom Spotify screen allows users to play their favourite music and podcasts easily and safely in their non-tech-savvy car without touching their phone.Between your work commute, dropping the kids off at school, daily errands and weekend road trips, we all spend countless hours on the road. It’s no surprise then, that there are over 70 million user-generated driving-related playlists available on Spotify. With the rise of smartphones, music streaming services such as Spotify have grown in popularity and hold right of place in many of our car trips.
Although many cars on the roads have Bluetooth streaming or even smartphone mirroring like Apple Carplay or Android Auto, some of us are still stuck with just an AUX input or just the old-fashioned AM/FM radio to satisfy our music needs. Spotify has launched a new gadget called Car Thing which gives the less tech savvy car the modern smart screen tech experience.
While it’s not a compete in-car infotainment system, Car Thing displays all your Spotify audio needs in a simple and easy to use interface that attaches to your air vent like a phone cradle.
Car Thing is said to include voice control, an old school dial for a hands-on way to steer the audio, a touch-screen display to show what’s playing as well as the ability to search your library, browse, skip or tap to play.
“Our focus remains on becoming the world’s number one audio platform—not on creating hardware—but we developed Car Thing because we saw a need from our users, many of whom were missing out on a seamless and personalized in-car listening experience.” The official Spotify release states.
“No matter the year or model of your vehicle, we feel everyone should have a superior listening experience. With Car Thing, we’ll now be bringing our entire catalogue of music and podcasts to a wider range of users across an even wider range of vehicles.”
Car Thing is currently only available to US users and will require a Spotify Premium account and a smartphone with WiFi or mobile data connection to connect. The Car Thing module is aid to cost $79.99 USD. There’s no word yet whether it will be rolled out globally.
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