Spotfy's car accessory can't beat a phone mount

The Spotify Car Thing lets you use your voice and simplified touch controls to stream music in your car, but it doesn't offer a major benefit over a cheap clip-on phone mount.

Between streaming audio and providing turn-by-turn directions, smartphones have become essential for most drivers. And generally speaking, it’s easier than ever to hook your phone up to your car in a safe and useful way (I swear by my Honda Fit’s Android Auto and Apple CarPlay integrations). If you don't have access to easy connectivity options and still want to stream music as you drive, you might be tempted by Spotify's $89.99 Car Thing accessory, which clips to your dashboard and features both a color touch screen and a dial for controlling Spotify playback. While the Car Thing is easy to use and nice to look at, it relies relies heavily on your smartphone, lacks a navigation mode, and doesn't offer any voice features you can't already get via the Spotify app. For far less money, a simple car phone mount brings similar utility to your vehicle using your existing handset.

The Car Thing looks a bit like a small smartphone: It’s a black device with a plastic body and a glass front panel that measures about 3 by 5 by 1 inches (HWD). A 4-inch, 800-by-480-pixel touch screen sits on the front, with a large rubberized dial and a smaller black plastic button on the right. The top edge of the device has a series of five buttons (four for presets and one for settings), as well as four pinhole microphones. A tiny rubber tag with the Spotify logo extends from the left edge.

The back is mostly flat, with a raised section that takes up about a third of the space. This protrusion includes a USB-C port for power, and has a metal panel behind the plastic casing that facilitates the connection to the magnetic puck-shaped holder.

You get several different mounts with the Car Thing, in addition to the magnetic holder that snaps into all of them. There’s a vent clip with two sets of flexible prongs, a CD mount with a flat insert that fits inside any slot-loading CD player, and an adhesive mount with a sticky strip that attaches to the dashboard. My Honda Fit doesn’t have a CD player, and the adhesive mount didn’t stick too well to the textured surface of my dashboard, but the vent clip stayed in place despite my nonstandard air vents. The magnetic holder clipped in securely and the Car Thing stayed put in testing, despite remaining easy to remove.

In addition to the mounting accessories, the Car Thing comes with a cigarette lighter adapter with two USB ports, a USB-A-to-USB-C cable, and two small adhesive cable clips to prevent the wire from dangling. You can also power the Car Thing directly if your car has a USB port; it worked with the one in my vehicle without issue.

First off, you need a Spotify account to use the Car Thing, so if you don't already have one, you'll need to create one.

To get started using the Car Thing, I placed it on its mount and plugged it into my car’s USB port. It powered on and prompted me to scan a QR code on the screen with my phone. The code launched the Spotify app and walked me through pairing the Car Thing with my phone over Bluetooth. It then told me to connect my phone to my car’s sound system over another Bluetooth connection or with an aux cable. I opted for the former method, because you don't get a cable in the box and the iPhone 12 I used for testing doesn’t have a headphone jack.

With these steps complete, the Car Thing successfully linked to my Spotify account; it automatically turned on and connected to my phone every time I started my car. My phone then connected to my car over Bluetooth, which it was already set up to do.

If you’ve been paying attention to the setup process, you might have noticed that the Car Thing connects only to your phone, not to the car itself. Your phone handles all of the audio, from receiving it through the Spotify app to sending it to your car’s speakers. In other words, the Car Thing acts only as a control panel for the Spotify app on your phone.

The control panel looks and feels nice, and I had no trouble using "Hey, Spotify” commands to search for music. But you can also set up that same voice control feature in the Spotify app on your phone.

The Car Thing's interface is simple to a fault. It shows big tiles for your favorite music, and you use the dial to scroll left and right through your options, which saves you from having to fumble with the touch screen while you drive. However, none of this is an advancement over the Spotify app's Car Mode, which also offers simplified menus. Unfortunately, the company retired this feature last year, but is currently testing a new one(Opens in a new window) .

The screen looks fairly crisp for its size, and is bright enough to be comfortably seen even when driving in the middle of the day under a clear sky. It isn't particularly colorful, but you'll be able to recognize album art without issue. But while the tiles for different artists, songs, and other content are easy to read, their large size makes the interface feel cramped, as does the dial that overlaps the right edge of the screen.

The system also feels fairly unintuitive to navigate via touch, especially if you want to access your library for specific playlists and podcasts. For that, you need to turn the dial to the right, past the Home section of recommendations and the oddly named Voice section that shows your voice search history, before you reach the Library section. You can say, “Hey Spotify, show my library,” to jump to that section, but at that point, you might as well just use your voice for everything.

Voice controls can be cumbersome, though. When you ask for something, the screen still shows the search results even after the audio starts playing. If you want the full-screen display with playback controls, you need to press the back button on the Car Thing twice (pressing it once takes you to the home screen).

You can set any of the four preset buttons to whatever is currently playing by pressing and holding it down until it saves. Make sure that the Shuffle feature is on if you want a random playlist or radio station; otherwise, the device saves the currently playing song in the playlist and will continue through the rest of the tracks in order. Turning on Shuffle for one playlist turns it on universally, so if you want to listen to the playlist in its regular arrangement, you need to uncheck the Shuffle option (at which point all presets will revert to the non-randomized mode). There’s also no way to add presets through the Spotify app if you’re browsing on your phone.

The Car Thing offers a simple interface for managing calls, but this integration still relies entirely on your phone’s connection to your car. And if you use your phone to navigate, the Car Thing can't help you, as it doesn’t show any maps or directions. For that functionality, you probably want to get a phone mount to use alongside the Car Thing, but that could make an already cramped dashboard nearly unusable and very distracting, so we don't recommend that setup. And if you're already using a phone mount for navigation, you probably don't need the Car Thing.

The Spotify Car Thing is a decent accessory if you're a heavy Spotify streamer and don't use your phone in the car for directions. If your vehicle supports Android Auto or Apple CarPlay, however, you really don't gain much beyond the Car Thing's physical control dial. For vehicles without access to those systems, a simple phone mount also does the trick. Although a mount isn't quite as slick as the Car Thing, using one still allows you to easily control Spotify by voice, as well as to see directions and other information from your navigation service of choice.

The Spotify Car Thing lets you use your voice and simplified touch controls to stream music in your car, but it doesn't offer a major benefit over a cheap clip-on phone mount.

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I’ve been PCMag’s home entertainment expert for over 10 years, covering both TVs and everything you might want to connect to them. I’ve reviewed more than a thousand different consumer electronics products including headphones, speakers, TVs, and every major game system and VR headset of the last decade. I’m an ISF-certified TV calibrator and a THX-certified home theater professional, and I’m here to help you understand 4K, HDR, Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, and even 8K (and to reassure you that you don’t need to worry about 8K at all for at least a few more years).

Home theater technology (TVs, media streamers, and soundbars)

Smart speakers and smart displays

I test TVs with a Klein K-80 colorimeter, a Murideo SIX-G signal generator, a HDFury Diva 4K HDMI matrix, and Portrait Displays’ Calman software. That’s a lot of complicated equipment specifically for screens, but that doesn’t cover what I run on a daily basis.

I use an Asus ROG Zephyr 14 gaming laptop as my primary system for both work and PC gaming (and both, when I review gaming headsets and controllers), along with an aging Samsung Notebook 7 as my portable writing station. I keep the Asus laptop in my home office, with a Das Keyboard 4S and an LG ultrawide monitor attached to it. The Samsung laptop stays in my bag, along with a Keychron K8 mechanical keyboard, because I’m the sort of person who will sit down in a coffee shop and bust out not only a laptop, but a separate keyboard. Mechanical just feels better.

For my own home theater, I have a modest but bright and accurate TCL 55R635 TV and a Roku Streambar Pro; bigger and louder would usually be better, but not in a Brooklyn apartment. I keep a Nintendo Switch dock connected to it, along with a PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X so I can test any peripheral that comes out no matter what system it’s for. I also have a Chromecast With Google TV for general content streaming.

As for mobile gear, I’m surprisingly phone-ambivalent and have swapped between iPhones and Pixels from generation to generation. I favor the iPhone for general snapshots when I need to take pictures of products or cover events, but I also have a Sony Alpha A6000 camera for when I feel like photo walking.

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