- The Spotify Car Thing was a dedicated streamer box for vehicles.
- Spotify turned off its servers in late 2024, effectively bricking the hardware.
- Open source efforts have tried to keep Car Thing active, and a new project recreates a lot of original functionality
Back in 2021, Spotify set itself apart from competing music streaming platforms by launching its own dedicated hardware for your vehicle: the Spotify Car Thing. Especially if you had an older car that didn’t offer an easy way to use Android Auto, the Car Thing represented a cheap and easy way to enjoy streaming content from behind the wheel. While Spotify ultimately shut the project down, flipping the servers off in late 2024, there’s now a new open source project ready to breathe new life into Car Thing hardware.
Spotify’s Car Thing offered a really straightforward package: a screen for finding Spotify content, and a big knob for easy interactions. But after Spotify pulled the plug on things, it wasn’t immediately clear what the future would look like for the abandoned hardware. While some users immediately started talking about hacking it, others cautioned that the very low-end hardware within didn’t offer a great platform for development. Nonetheless, we did see quite a few interesting projects emerge, and this week we’re learning about the latest one, called Mira.
