Now everyone in the United States can buy a Spotify Car Thing

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Car Thing
Car Thing (Image credit: Spotify)

What you need to know

  • Spotify Car Thing is now available for everyone.
  • The $90 attachment is a touchscreen remote for your iPhone.

Anyone who really wants to buy themselves a new Spotify Car Thing can do so after the streamer made the in-car device available for everyone across the United States so long as they're a paying customer.

Having previously limited the Car Thing to an invite-only affair, Spotify is now giving everyone the chance to buy one of the touchscreens. They'll need to be a Spotify Premium subscriber, however, and then head to the Car Thing website and hand over $90.

A strange device, Car Thing is a touchscreen that can be stick to your car and then connected to your iPhone via Bluetooth. The touchscreen then becomes the way you interact with Spotify — or you can use your voice, it's your choice. But the audio will still come out of your iPhone unless you pair it with your car. Car Thing doesn't have speakers of its own and it can't connect to anything other than your iPhone. It's like a big remote control for the Spotify app that you have installed. It's all a bit weird, really.

This is Car Thing from Spotify, now available in the US. Ask, tap, turn or swipe to get to your favorites faster. With "Hey Spotify" you have hands-free music, every mile of the way. Car Thing works with any Premium account and connects to a mobile phone for data.

You're still better using CarPlay is still the best iPhone option if your car already supports it of course, but there's a world where Car Thing might be better than nothing, at least.

Oliver Haslam
Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.