Home > News

Spotify’s New “Car View:” What Does It Do?

By Simon Batt
Spotify’s New “Car View:” What Does It Do? Featured Image

Do you enjoy listening to music in the car? If so, you may have already taken advantage of Spotify to deliver those sweet tunes during your long journeys. If you have, you may be interested to hear that Spotify silently slipped in an update for their app that adds a new “car view” mode. This is aimed at keeping Spotify as distraction-free as possible, so you can keep your eyes on the road instead of your playlist.

What Does It Do?

Simply put, Car View reduces the UI of Spotify to contain larger buttons. This makes it easier to tap through your music collection when you’re on the move. All the icons and album names are larger, too, making it easier to see what’s playing while in the driver’s seat. While you can’t swipe to change songs just yet, it may be a feature that’s added in a future update.

What makes this new Car View feature appealing is how it can automatically engage the moment you climb into your car. It does this by looking for your car’s Bluetooth signal. When it detects that you’re near your car, Spotify will automatically load “Car View” when you open it. All you need to worry about is putting the phone in its cradle and hitting the Play button, and Spotify will take care of everything for you.

Unfortunately, at the time of writing there is no manual way to enable Car Mode. This means you can’t benefit from this new feature if you’re driving an older model of car. Hopefully, Spotify will see a manual way of enabling this feature later on down the line, after the app has had time to gather feedback from users.

Also read: 14 Useful Spotify Tips & Tricks to Get the Most Out of Your Spotify Account

How to Enable or Disable Car Mode

By default, if your Spotify app is up to date, it should engage Car Mode the moment you step into your car. You have to ensure your Bluetooth is enabled so your phone can see your car when you approach it. Then, it’s just a case of putting the phone in its holder and going on your way.

If it’s not engaging automatically, you can go into the settings to see if the update has rolled out for you yet. You can also visit the settings if you really don’t like Spotify’s Car Mode and want it to keep its normal layout as you drive.

To enable or disable Car Mode (or just see if you have it!), first boot Spotify, then tap “Your Library” at the bottom-right.

spotify-car-library

Tap the cog at the top-right.

spotify-car-cog

Scroll down to the “Car” category. Underneath should be “Car View” – toggle this on or off as you see fit. If you don’t see the Car category or Car View, your app hasn’t been updated to support it just yet.

spotify-car-view

Also read: 6 Web Apps to Supercharge Your Spotify Experience

Vroom with a View

Spotify’s new Car View is a great way to make playing your playlists easier as you drive. Now you know how it works, what it does, and how to enable or disable it to your liking.

Do you listen to Spotify while on the move? Do you think you’ll enjoy this new feature? Let us know below.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Simon Batt Avatar
Simon Batt
Simon Batt is a Computer Science graduate with a passion for cybersecurity.

Read next

Octopuses possess roughly 500 million neurons distributed across their body, with two-thirds located in their arms rather than their central brain, meaning each arm can taste, problem-solve, and react to stimuli independently of whatever the octopus is otherwise paying attention to.
Explore the historic Roman bridge in lush Salamanca, Spain captured beautifully in daylight.
The Roman aqueduct at Segovia, built around the first century AD without mortar, still carried water into the 1970s, its 167 granite arches held together by nothing but the precise weight distribution of stones cut to fit each other within fractions of a millimeter.
When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.