Bad is what ends badly, versioning the popular proverb, and even worse what begins badly and ends badly, to give it even more forcefulness. Y that is exactly what has happened with Spotify Car Thing, a device announced by Spotify at the end of last year and that went on sale in February of this year. A device that saw its way paved when, coinciding with its announcement, Spotify removed Car View and, a few months later (a month after Spotify Car Thing was put on sale) decided to also end compatibility with several Pioneer car devices and JVC-Kenwood.
For a price of $89.99, and for sale only in the United States, Spotify Car Thing was intended to be the default Spotify player for cars. The proposal, technologically speaking, was not bad, since we are talking about a device with a 4-inch touch screen, compatibility with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, and voice control through noise-canceling microphones. A device that would have made sense, if it hadn’t been for the fact that it didn’t add anything new to all the existing solutions of this type, ranging from the integration of Apple CarPlay and Android Auto in the cars themselves, to the possibility of connecting a smartphone to the vehicle using a hands-free.
Even so, Spotify took the two measures mentioned above, and that went directly against its users, reaping quite negative reviews from them, we can imagine that relying on Spotify Car Thing to be a success. Something that, unfortunately for its income statement and for its image, has not happened, to the point that, according to what we can read in The Verge, the company has already finished the production of the Spotify Car Thing and is currently selling the stock it maintains of them. Of course, with a significant reduction, since it has dropped from the $89.99 that it initially cost to the $49.99 for which it can be purchased today.
The company would have invested 31 million euros in the Spotify Car Thing project, which has had a fairly negative impact on its quarterly closing of accounts. And it is that, as could be imagined, the device would have generated much less interest among users than the company expected. Something that we could already begin to intuit when, after pressure, and surely after seeing the numbers, the company stated that it was already working on a new Car View mode. However, knowing the deadlines with which they work, it is possible that we still have to wait a while. Maybe less, yes, now that Spotiy Car Thing is beginning to be just a memory of the past.
