Spotify's Car Thing has had an unusually eventful afterlife. The four-inch touchscreen dash controller launched in the US at $89.99, was discontinued in July 2022 after roughly five months on general sale, and was then remotely disabled on 9 December 2024 — at which point Spotify advised owners to recycle the hardware, with refunds eventually offered to eligible purchasers. A free open-source firmware called Mira 1.0 has now brought the device back.
Flashed onto the hardware over USB-C, Mira replaces Spotify's original software entirely and restores the parts that made Car Thing useful in a car: playback transport, the physical volume dial, the four preset buttons, album artwork, lyrics, podcast support with synchronised transcripts, and output device selection. It adds its own "Hey Mira" voice control for playback, volume and queue management, and supports pairing multiple phones over Bluetooth. No companion app, extra account or subscription is required.
The caveats are real. Mira works only with Spotify and still needs a Spotify sign-in plus an internet connection tethered from a phone over Bluetooth or a computer over USB. Installation requires a computer and wipes the original firmware, so this is not a casual update. The developers also acknowledge that the device sometimes struggles to wake from sleep and that Bluetooth does not always reconnect automatically. The project is published at github.com/mira-thing/mira-releases.
Why it matters for tuning: a controller like this sits upstream of everything you actually tune, so it changes what you listen to but not how your system measures. Car Thing is a remote for a phone — the audio path is still phone to head unit to DSP to amplifiers, and Mira does not add EQ, time alignment or level control of its own. The practical point for anyone running a measured tune is to make sure whatever app is feeding that path has its own equaliser and any loudness or volume-normalisation setting switched off, because a source-side curve you have forgotten about is one of the most common reasons an RTA sweep refuses to match the target you set in the DSP.
The broader story is about ownership. Car Thing's screen, dial and buttons never stopped working; what stopped was Spotify's willingness to support them. That a volunteer project could restore full function to hardware a manufacturer had written off is worth remembering when you are choosing between a 12-volt product with on-board processing and one that depends on a vendor's servers to do anything at all.
