There’s a short tutorial at setup that goes over how to use the back button and the scroll wheel, but it’s easy to figure out even without an explainer.

Navigating Car Thing with those few buttons and particularly the scroll wheel was a pleasure, and it’s a very intuitive UX. There are further tabs to dive into recommendations and your library in particular as well. You can see your most recent playlists or albums, radio stations, as well as some recommended content, too. The “homescreen” though, acts a lot like the “home” tab in the Spotify mobile app, but with a bit more of a focus on your library of content. When music is playing, you’ll have a fullscreen display that includes the song title, artist, and album art, as well as play/pause, skip/back, and shuffle and “like” buttons. The device is designed solely to control Spotify playback, and nothing else. Spotify Car Thing has a touchscreen display with five buttons along the top, a scroll wheel that covers a small portion of the display, and a back button below that. But, in short, it’s a small display designed and optimized for accessing your Spotify library from the road in a way that (mostly) keeps your eyes on the road.

With a non-descript name such as “Car Thing,” you’d be forgiven if you can’t fully imagine what this device is capable of. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been using Spotify Car Thing to control music on my drives, and while it’s a device full of great ideas, I can’t help but feel it’s somewhat redundant at this point. We’re all encouraged to keep our hands off of our phones while driving, but as our media shifts from the radio to streaming apps, that becomes just a bit harder.

My car thing spotify