Spotify Discontinues Car Thing

Spotify discontinued its curious Car Thing in-car audio player after barely two years of availability in the market. And taking a page from the Sonos playbook, it’s handling this transition poorly.

“We have made the decision to discontinue Car Thing,” the Spotify support website explains. “This means that Car Thing will no longer be operational. This decision wasn’t made lightly, and we want to assure you that our commitment to providing a superior listening experience remains unchanged.”

In other words, Spotify intends to completely brick Car Thing, rendering it useless to the customers who paid $90 for this device. The end arrives on December 9, 2024, Spotify says.

Worse, Spotify isn’t offering to refund customers or recycle the soon-to-be-useless devices. Instead, it recommends “safely disposing of your device following local electronic waste guidelines,” creating a legal and ethical burden for its customers.

Worse still, Spotify says it made this decision because it wants to “streamline [its] product offerings.” This is in the wake of a quarter in which the service crushed it financially, with double-digit growth across monthly active users, subscribers, profit, and revenues. And, perhaps more to the point, in the wake of major and expensive forays into podcasts and audiobooks, neither of which feel core to the brand. So perhaps there’s a more obvious way to streamline.

But here’s the asterisk. Spotify started selling Car Thing in February 2022, and it stopped manufacturing and selling the product just 5 months later, in July 2022. It took a $31 million charge related to that cancelation at the time.

My guess is that Spotify, which has rarely been profitable, is wary of taking another charge related to Car Thing refunds, trade-in offers, and recycling, though any of those would be a far more responsible and customer-centric approach to finally killing off this weird little product. But it’s hard to say: We don’t know how many people bought the Car Thing, let alone how many are still using it.