Spotify Car Thing has gone off the rails – and fans are absolutely furious that someone is blocking it

Spotify’s dedicated car controller, Car Thing, will soon become No Thing – or Bricked Thing, if you prefer. Spotify’s short-lived hardware adventure ended in 2022 when the popular music streaming platform discontinued Car Thing and is now emailing buyers that their devices will stop working completely on December 9. “We understand this may be disappointing,” Spotify says – and that seems like an understatement.

While Spotify effectively tells you to throw your Car Thing in the trash (once you do a factory reset and find an e-waste recycling place to drop it off), there are growing calls to use it on an open-source basis so that volunteers can continue to support it . Disgruntled owners are taking to Reddit and Spotify communities to express their concerns and annoyances, but so far their pleas seem to be falling on deaf ears.

In an interview with Ars Technica, a Spotify spokesperson declined to answer questions, but said it’s “time to say goodbye to devices altogether.”

WHY DOES THE CAR STOP RUNNING???? r/spotify

The demise of Car Thing raises a broader issue around device locking

The message here is quite clear and simple: don’t invest in hardware if a company claims it’s an experiment, which is how Spotify described Car Thing. As the big green streaming giant said at the time, “Our goal is to remain the world’s leading audio platform – not to build hardware” – and it’s probably wise not to buy physical gadgets from companies that don’t offer dedicated hardware.

But there’s also a broader issue here, which is that Spotify is not only withdrawing support, but actively blocking a product that it only released in February 2022 – and for which people paid $90.

Car Thing is essentially a remote control for the Spotify app – a way to stream music to cars and other vehicles that don’t have Bluetooth audio – and I really can’t understand why Spotify chose to remotely disable this feature instead of just leaving it at that.

This is an issue that occurs in products other than car audio accessories. The smarter our technology becomes, the more dependent it is on continued manufacturer software support, and as this particular cancellation shows, manufacturers can and do withdraw that support whenever they see fit. And that’s not the only concern: We’ve recently seen Roku block people from accessing smart TVs and streamers if they don’t agree to new terms that weren’t in effect when they purchased their devices.

Regulation clearly plays a role here – in the UK, the consumer association which publishes Which? magazine is campaigning on this very issue – but it also means that when purchasing equipment we need to think about more than just what the device can do. Increasingly, we also have to wonder: what could the manufacturer do to ruin it?