Spotify Car Thing review: Just use your phone

Your phone can do the job better, and you need it around anyway

I’m a big fan of music, and finding new jams is so important to me that I can’t help but use Spotify. I wish the service paid artists better and would stop trying to shove podcasts down my throat, but its recommendations and dynamic playlists have been second to none, and I can thank it for most of the music I’ve discovered in the last half-decade, and my co-workers can thank it for my regular playlist Slack spam. But, my love for Spotify doesn’t extend to its new hardware. A Spotify-only in-car remote control for your phone is, frankly, pointless — but it doesn't have to be.

Design, hardware, what's in the box

There are plenty of music streaming services out there, but Spotify has set itself apart from all the rest thanks to its intensive customer analytics. That’s what drives Spotify’s excellent discovery systems, features like the end-of-the-year Wrapped experience, and playlists like Your Top Songs and Discover Weekly. Car Thing is a first, tentative step to bring that experience into hardware form, and it stumbles.

You’d be forgiven if you confused the Car Thing’s plastic body for metal given its gritty texture and the precision in fit and finish. The screen is just shy of four inches, accented by a big rotary dial that partially blocks it, augmented by a handful of buttons. An accenting rubber tag with the Spotify logo and wordmark sticks out of the left edge, which is more fun than the sort of screen printed branding you’d expect, and a nice touch.

A row of additional buttons on the top of the Car Thing studded between the microphone array offers quick and configurable shortcuts to specific content or playlists and settings, but they’re hard to hit — I wish they were either bigger or somewhere on Car Thing’s face. Power is supplied over USB Type-C via a port on the back. There’s no built-in audio out (more on that later).

You’ll never use it this way, but the Car Thing feels premium and well made in hand. It’s also a good size — not too big that it’s hard to find a spot to put it on your dash, with a screen just large enough to be useful without being obtrusive. The screen has good viewing angles and gets both bright enough and dim enough automatically for use in all driving situations.

The rotary dial, which controls your phone’s volume, isn’t the clickiest out there, but it is easy enough to use in tandem with that button beneath it for the simple and relatively intuitive interface. The dial is easy to grip with a thumb and forefinger or rotate with an absentminded push.

All this attaches to your dash, vent, or CD slot via a rotating two-part mount, but it’s a little flimsy. It’s sort of a sandwich: you have the piece that holds to the surface (or vent, or CD player) and provides a flat, round receptacle for the middle piece. That piece connects the mount to the Car Thing itself, attaching like a barnacle magnetically to the Car Thing and clipping into the mount. Those superfluous layers cumulatively add enough play in the system that pushing the dial or face button will disconcertingly wobble the Car Thing in its mount.

I used the Car Thing with the shortest 3M adhesive-backed mount, since it seemed to offer the most stability and took up the least space, but the CD or vent mounts could be even worse. With how nicely made the Car Thing itself is, the flimsy-feeling mount is even more of a disappointment. I reached out to Spotify to see if the issue was just with my unit, but the company did not respond.

The Car Thing comes with all that mounting hardware, compatible with vents, CD players, or any flat-ish surface in your car, plus a USB Type-C power cable and a 12V power adapter. There are some clips as well for better cable routing which I immediately lost, and a cleaning cloth you don’t have to pay $19 for.

Set up, software, and performance

To use Car Thing you’ll need to be a premium Spotify subscriber, and you’ll need to own a car (duh) and a phone. There’s some weirdness if you have a family plan — only the plan’s owner can buy a Car Thing. Car Thing works with both iOS and Android, but we (hopefully understandably) tested it with the latter. Car Thing also works with CarPlay and Android Auto, but we used it standalone.

Setting up the Car Thing is simple. When you plug it in for the first time, the screen displays a QR code you can scan with your phone that takes you to the app and through the process to pair it with your phone via Bluetooth. The first-time steps also guide you through how to mount the phone to your car, but that should be a self-explanatory process for most people. You can also trigger the setup process manually via the app in Settings -> Car Thing to pair an already-set-up Car Thing to a new device, but just pairing the new phone in the Bluetooth settings menu seems to do the job fine, too.

Once things are correctly configured, your phone will automatically connect to the Car Thing when it’s powered on — If you’re not doing anything unusual, that means when you get into your car and start it. As soon as your phone connects to whatever mechanism you use for audio, playback will start wherever you last left off.

Navigating around the Car Thing interface is surprisingly simple, and there are a few ways you can do it between the screen, voice, and buttons. If you’ve used the Spotify app on any platform, the interface should feel immediately familiar, with side-scrolling lists and identical commands and features. There’s a home screen that shows a mix of recommended content, a “Voice” tab that shows things you’ve searched for related to recent vocal queries, and a Your Library tab where all your liked songs and playlists live.

Car Thing responds to “Hey Spotify” voice commands that can trigger playlists, albums, specific songs, or anything else you’d like to hear. You can also control playback or save content. (If you’ve used Google Assistant to trigger Spotify, it's similar to that, but with actions and results understandably limited to Spotify.) One particularly convenient thing is that you can ask for Spotify to “show” you things, so if you know it won’t grab the right playlist by name, you can ask to see your playlists and then scroll to the one you want. That saves a little time compared to navigating to the playlist section manually.

If you don’t want to talk to your stereo, you can also navigate via the buttons and screen. The big rotary dial lets you scroll through content, tapping it to select or pressing the smaller button below it to navigate back. That dial also controls your phone’s volume and play/pause when you’re on the playback screen. Four of the five buttons on the top/back serve as shortcuts that you can program by long-pressing, but the fifth in the corner takes you to a settings menu where you can do things like pair extra phones, factory reset, restart, or disable the microphone (which isn’t triggered unless you say the “Hey Spotify” hotword, don’t worry).

Screen controls vary, but you can “like” songs to save them to your playlist, seek tracks, play/pause, and enable and disable shuffle — all commands you can also trigger with your voice.

Once in a while, the Car Thing might need an update, and that process ostensibly happens automatically in the background with the default settings, though at least once I had an update pending for several days with seemingly no way to apply it. Car Thing’s support documentation says a message will appear when updates are available in that situation.

It’s hard to measure relative performance in a novel category like this, but you will notice plenty of dropped frames and general jank when using Car Thing. I don’t know if that’s a software issue or underpowered hardware, but scrolling around the UI isn’t particularly smooth. Audio quality is also a question, but that depends entirely on your phone, Spotify streaming settings, and how it’s connected to your car (wired vs Bluetooth, and which codec), so it can and will vary.

As I mentioned before, there’s no built-in audio out, so Car Thing relies on your phone to supply audio — that can be either wired or via a secondary Bluetooth device. Coming to the crux of this review, Car Thing merely provides a dedicated screen to navigate and manage Spotify playback. It’s what the Car Thing was admittedly built to do, but it’s also its biggest flaw because it’s simply duplicating a limited subset of your phone’s functionality, all while you need your phone around for it to work. In simpler terms: Car Thing just does what your phone does, but worse.

I’ve tried to dance around different ways of saying that, but there aren’t really any. Car Thing’s single-purpose use offers too many shortcomings over simply using your phone in a mount with either the Assistant’s driving mode, the now-deprecated standalone Android Auto, or even just Google Maps/Waze and the music service integration bundled into each.

For one, Car Thing doesn’t offer navigation, and though you can fire up Google Maps separately on your phone and have it read out turn-by-turn directions mixed in with your music, you don’t have the benefit of seeing them on the screen as you would with your phone in a mount or Android Auto. Although you can set up custom automation triggers via things like Tasker to enable a do not disturb mode, the Car Thing also doesn’t mute unnecessary notifications, as driving mode does. Spotify’s voice commands are also much more limited compared to the Google Assistant, and you can’t have messages read back to you or fire off important responses with your voice.

If you already need your phone around for the Car Thing to do its job, why not just use its screen instead and get that fuller, better experience? I wish I could drop an “aha, but!” here and explain precisely how the Car Thing adds something special or unique, but apart from adding a hardware dial and its own voice commands, it doesn’t.

Should you buy it?

No, even big Spotify fans can give the Car Thing a pass.

Do you remember the mid-aughts when satellite radio really started to take off and companies like XM sold kits to add it to your car? The Car Thing is essentially Spotify’s take on that concept, but it simultaneously ignores and relies on the fact that we’ve all got a smartphone in our pocket now that can do even more. It’s absurd, and though I was excited to try out the concept as an unabashed and unapologetic Spotify addict, now that I’ve used it for the last two weeks, I don’t understand why the company felt the Car Thing needed to exist.

As it applies to the Car Thing, there are basically two kinds of cars out there: Those with modern infotainment systems that support things like Android Auto and those that don’t. If you’re in the former camp and your car has Android Auto, Car Thing seems entirely superfluous to me. But, if you’re in the latter camp, Car Thing’s dependency on your phone means you’re just better off using your phone to do the same things instead — unless, for some reason, you really want a dedicated screen for just Spotify and you don’t need navigation.

It’s not often I end a review confused. Usually, spending some time with a product gives me insight into the best ways to use it and the sort of workflow it enables. I’m ultimately here to figure out if and when something is worth your time and money. But as a Spotify stan, I just do not understand what Spotify was thinking. If Car Thing offered navigation of some kind — say, via a Google Maps integration — there might be some convenience to it as a replacement for your phone’s screen. But if you’re looking to spend $80 to bring Spotify to your car, just spend that money on a really, really nice phone mount instead.

Buy it if:

• You want a dedicated screen in your car for Spotify and your phone won’t do (even though you’ll need it around anyway).

Don’t buy it if:

• Navigation is sometimes necessary alongside your music.
• You have an Android Auto-equipped car.
• You own a car mount for your phone — honestly that’s a better experience.

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