Spotify has made its Car Thing available to some users on an invite-only basis in the United States.Courtesy of manufacturer
Keep it simple. It’s sound advice and savvy business. Why complicate matters when you can get your point across in a clear basic fashion? This must have been the thinking at Spotify, the audio streaming and media-services provider, when the company decided to name its voice-controlled podcast-assistant hardware “Car Thing.”
Announced in 2019, Spotify has just made Car Thing available to some users on an invite-only basis in the United States. The reductive bluntness of “Car Thing” is a far cry from the name “Spotify,” which, on the surface, has absolutely nothing to do with music, streaming or audio. If the company made stain-removing products, the name Spotify would make sense. Spotify is an enormous company, so it is important to remember that a lot of money and market testing went into the name Car Thing. At some meeting, someone must have said, “What about ‘VAC’ for ‘Voice Audio Assistant?’ To which the CEO may have replied, “No we’re going with Car Thing.”
If it works, Car Thing opens up a host of branding opportunities.
Such as:
- Hand Thing
- Face Thing
- Ear Thing
- Mouth Thing
- Brain Thing
- Thing Thing
- Groin Thing
- Your Thing
- My Thing
- Their Thing
- EveryTHING
- Eye Thing
- The Thing
The possibilities are endless…
Then again, it may be that the folks at Spotify just loved the idea of hundreds of millions of people thinking to themselves “You make my heart sing” every time some says the name “Car Thing.”
The device is compact and comes with a dial, touch screen and preset buttons. It can be connected to a vehicle’s sound system with an aux or USB jack or wirelessly with Bluetooth. It has an in-app voice assistant that lets users boss it around (“Come on Car Thing, play Air Supply!”).
Car Thing may rival Apple’s similarly imaginatively dubbed “CarPlay.” Both devices allow users to fiddle with music and podcasts while operating multi-ton vehicles at high speeds. In its media release for Car Thing, Spotify said it is part of the company’s mission to create “a truly frictionless audio experience for our users.” It makes one wonder what kind of nightmare hellscape Spotify executives think their users dwell in. I’ve never felt my audio experience was full of “friction.” (Maybe a little light static. Then again, my in-car audio safe-word is “Air Supply.”)
Interestingly enough, Car Thing was launched at the same time another term was coined – “Zoom Zombie.” The term applies to the effect Zoom calls have on drivers. A survey of 1,819 drivers by Root Insurance found 54 per cent of those surveyed admitted to having trouble concentrating after a video call or meeting. Sixty-four per cent said they checked their phones while driving (up from 54 per cent in 2019). In other words, a driver can not only be distracted by devices while driving, they can be distracted by using devices before they drive.
According to Root Insurance founder and CEO Alex Timm, “COVID-19 fundamentally changed the way we interact with our vehicles. As many abruptly shifted to a virtual environment, Americans’ reliance on technology dramatically increased along with their screen time, causing a majority of drivers to carry this distracted behavior into their vehicles.”
All one can do is step back in wonder. I use Spotify. I listened to Daily Mix while writing this this piece of solid-gold prose. (I was devoted to the now long-gone RDIO, but that’s all in the past.) I like music, podcasts and audio. Show me a stream, and I’m at your service. Still, these names bewilder me.
To me, it’s just another thing you better be careful not to let distract you while you drive.
Andrew Clark