The Cherry on Top: A Self-Driving Car for an All-In Year
When you spend a year teaching AI to do your job, it changes how you see everything. So when it came time to celebrate going all-in on AI in 2025, there was really only one way to do it: let AI drive me home. I picked up a Tesla Model S Plaid with Full Self-Driving 14.2.2. Not as a flex. As a statement.
The Parallel
All year, I've been learning to automate work that happens through a keyboard and mouse. Customer service requests that used to require human attention now route through AI agents. Technical documentation that took hours to compile now generates itself. The pattern is always the same: define the outcome, provide the context, let the system execute.
Driving is no different. The steering wheel is just another input device—and like the keyboard, it's on borrowed time.
The Surreal Part
The first time FSD 14.2.2 drove me somewhere without intervention, I didn't know what to do with my hands. The car merged onto the highway, navigated traffic, and exited—all while I sat there like a passenger in my own vehicle.
But the moment that really got me? Coming home after dinner. The car suggested the restaurant. It drove me there and parked itself. After the meal, it drove me home, opened my garage door, and pulled into the garage. End to end, I didn't touch the wheel.
At the start of 2025, this wasn't possible. Not like this. Not in a consumer vehicle you could actually own.
What Changed
Tesla's Robotaxi pilot programs proved the model worked. Then they merged that AI stack into consumer vehicles running HW4. Suddenly, the same technology powering autonomous ride-hailing was sitting in driveways. The gap between "experimental" and "available" collapsed in months.
This is the part people miss about AI adoption. It's not linear. You wait, you wait, you wait—and then everything changes at once.
Why It Fits
For someone who spent 2025 betting that AI would reshape how we work, buying a self-driving car wasn't an indulgence. It was consistency. If I believe AI agents will replace manual processes at work, I have to believe they'll replace manual processes everywhere—including the commute.
Cars without steering wheels aren't science fiction. They're the same inevitability as offices without typewriters. We're just early enough to watch it happen.
The Model S Plaid is fast, sure. But that's not why I bought it. I bought it because after a year of letting AI do the work, it only made sense to let it do the driving too.