While many cars today are sold with Apple CarPlay or Android Auto so you can listen to podcasts or your music playlists, this only applies to higher-end models. Even now, many cars are manufactured with only the bare essentials, meaning they lack multimedia playback features, and for these cars, Spotify has launched Spotify Car Thing , its in-car music player.
Initial testing began publicly in 2019, and now the Spotify Car Thing is publicly available . It's on sale for around $90 in the United States, about ten dollars more than its previous price.
Now anyone can have Spotify in the car through a player device
Car Thing connects with the Spotify mobile app on your phone, and uses the phone's signal to transmit sound through the car's sound system. It works with USB, Bluetooth and Aux cable, so any car can play it.
During beta testing, Spotify found that users preferred Car Thing to their previous in-car media experience and liked being able to use Spotify voice commands to interact with their media. Updates will come in the future to add music or podcasts to the playback queue and a night mode that reduces the brightness of the device at night.
The Spotify Car Thing remains exclusive to the United States and still requires a Premium account of any kind, but it will likely be rolled out to the rest of the world in the coming months. Besides providing a reason to subscribe to Spotify Premium by not allowing free accounts, it also allows for the collection of usage data that could later be used to improve voice recognition, suggestion patterns, and more.
Source: Tech Power Up
