Spotify Starts Testing Its In-Car Music Player ‘Car Thing’

Back in January, we wrote about Spotify’s upcoming in-car music player. The company’s in-car music player was leaked through its app, and it was expected to launch the device sometime later this year.

And now, Spotify is making things official. Well, kind of.

The company today announced its in-car music player, called the Car Thing. Yes, literally.

Spotify’s Car Thing device is an in-car music and podcast player that will let you connect the device directly to your car and control playback with your Spotify. you can simply say “Hey Spotify” and give commands to the device to control the playback.

The device isn’t being made available to everyone, though. Spotify is only doing the “test” with a simple group of Premium users in the US, and technical + pricing details about the device isn’t being revealed. “While we know there has been some speculation about our future plans, Car Thing was developed to help us learn more about how people listen to music and podcasts. Our focus remains on becoming the world’s number one audio platform—not on creating hardware,” the company says.

Spotify even said the company might do similar tests for the Voice Thing and Home Thing in the future, so that should be interesting too. At the end of the day, though, Spotify makes it very clear that the company has no “current plans” to make the Car Thing available to consumers and it’s only part of a test — so you might not get to buy the device for your own car anytime soon.