And what a rainy afternoon in a Tesla taught me about AI-ready architecture
Up until a year ago, I was a die-hard physical-button purist when it came to operating a car.
Across the vehicles I had owned and driven over the years - an original British Rover (not a Land Rover - the old-school Rover), a Mazda 3, and for the past decade a diesel Hyundai i40 - I loved having real switches and dials under my fingers. Once you build muscle memory for a cabin, you know where every control lives and what it feels like. You can adjust almost anything in the car without taking your eyes off the road for a millisecond.
That preference hardened into dogma about ten years ago when a friend of mine bought a Ford Focus. Ford had just moved most of the centre stack onto a touchscreen, and changing the air-conditioning temperature required a multi-step choreography without any physical fallback: look away from the road, hunt down the climate icon on the screen, wait for the virtual temperature gauge to pop up, and swivel your finger along the scale. On a smartphone sitting on your couch, that is a perfectly fine interface. At 100 km/h on a freeway, it is a terrible way to stay alive.
From that day on, I was preconditioned against touchscreen-heavy cars - and Tesla sat right at the top of my no list. A cabin with a giant tablet bolted to the dash and almost zero physical buttons? - No thank you. That cannot be comfortable, and it cannot possibly work. I was so certain of it that I did not even have the curiosity to sit in one.
Act I: Shopping for an EV (Anything But a Tesla)
About a year ago, thanks to Australia's FBT-exempt novated lease incentive for electric vehicles, I found myself in the market for a new car - and the math meant it had to be an EV.
I ruled Tesla out from the start. For the record, Elon Musk's public political views had nothing to do with it; I do not take sides there, and my filter was purely engineering - if a product is good, I will buy it. I just happened to be convinced that Tesla's product UX was fundamentally broken, and I was not wild about the exterior styling either.
While researching the market, I did notice that about a month earlier Tesla had finally launched Full Self-Driving (Supervised) in Australia. Did that change my mind? - Not in the slightest. The keyword was Supervised. Sitting in the driver's seat required to pay full, undivided attention to the road while not actually driving sounded twice as boring and exhausting as just driving the car myself.
So I narrowed my shortlist down to three contenders with proper dashboards and real buttons: the Kia EV5, the Kia EV9, and the BYD Sealion 7. The reviews were solid - efficiency was not class-leading, sure, but owners generally liked them - and all that was left was to go test-drive them.
Act II: One Rainy Public Holiday, Two Different Centuries
On a grey, overcast Victorian public holiday, I finally had a free day to visit the dealerships. Actually, "nice day off" is a stretch: I had slept poorly the night before, I was exhausted, and I had a nagging headache.
I was driving toward the Kia dealership in the rain when I ran into a busy parking situation right next door - and purely by accident ended up pulling into the Tesla dealership lot just before it. Sitting there with my headache, I figured: well, since I am already parked here, I might as well walk in and cross it off the list.
I had no booking. I walked up to the counter, a staff member asked if I was looking at the cars, and within thirty seconds they offered me an on-the-spot test drive and asked if I wanted to try Full Self-Driving.
"Paperwork?" - They unlocked their phone, opened a form, and handed their phone over to me. I typed my name and driver's licence details and scribbled with my finger. That was it. They walked me outside, authorised the car over the air, spent two minutes showing me how to adjust the steering wheel and mirrors, and closed the door. They did not even get in the car with me. "Take it for 40 minutes, no rush - here is a good route for FSD."
Off I went into the wet traffic. The feel on the road was a bit different - and obviously much better and quieter than my ten-year-old Hyundai i40, and within a couple of minutes I engaged FSD. The car just kept going.
After ten minutes, something strange happened in my head. Look at the state I was in: it was overcast and raining, my head was throbbing, I was running on bad sleep, and I was sitting in a completely unfamiliar car where I had zero muscle memory for any of the controls. And the car was just... driving. It was not tired. It did not have a headache. It was never rushed, never distracted.
I sat there feeling not bored, but deeply grateful. If you have kids, you know the feeling when you are sick and exhausted and a relative or a trusted babysitter walks through the door and takes over for an hour. That was what the car was doing for me. Whenever I am not at my best - when I do not want the sport of driving and just need to get safely from point A to point B - the car has my back.
Why had I gotten it so backwards when I dismissed "Supervised FSD" on paper? - Turns out reading about FSD or watching YouTube videos of it is like reading a manual about sex: technically informative, emotionally useless. You cannot reason your way into how your nervous system reacts when a two-tonne machine smoothly negotiates a rainy Melbourne roundabout on its own while you nurse a headache. It felt like 2007 all over again, the week the original iPhone came out: suddenly there was the iPhone, and then there were "all the other phones".
When I handed the car back forty minutes later, I already knew I was buying a Tesla. Still, the Kia dealership was right next door, so I drove over to keep my original plan honest.
Walking into Kia felt like stepping through a time portal into the early 2000s. The yard was a maze of double- and triple-parked cars. When someone finally freed up, I asked to test-drive an EV9 (they only had the base trim on the lot; if I wanted the GT-Line, that would be a six-month wait).
Before we could go anywhere, we had to do the paperwork. They handed me a physical sheet of paper - one of those forms that has been photocopied off a photocopy 150 times until the text is fat, fuzzy, and tilted three degrees off-axis. I filled it out by hand with a pen and handed it back to the receptionist. What was the very first thing she did? - She laid my handwritten sheet next to her keyboard and started typing every single field into her computer by hand.
Then we waited while someone hunted down the physical key fob. Then we had to un-double-park the EV9. Finally, we pulled out onto the road with the salesperson riding shotgun beside me.
The EV9 drove fine - it was electric, so it was snappy compared to my old diesel Hyundai - but it was just another car. The cabin was a wall of physical buttons I had yet to acquaint myself with. Halfway through the drive, the salesperson asked, "Want to try the heated steering wheel?" Sure, why not. I pressed the button for Level 1. It was not even a cold day, and within three minutes my palms were burning and I swiftly did another hunt for an off button.
Everything worked, yet all of it felt like doing things the old way when there was no longer any reason to. When I finished with the EV9, my headache was still there and my curiosity was gone. I did not even bother driving over to BYD to try the Sealion 7. Neither Kia nor BYD could drive itself, and once you cross that line, the rest of the spec sheet falls off the table.
Act III: Why the Missing Buttons Suddenly Made Sense
A few weeks after picking up my Tesla, I was driving home on a genuinely cold Melbourne evening. A couple of minutes into the trip, I noticed a gentle, pleasant warmth in my hands. Until that moment, I was not even sure the car had a heated steering wheel. The car had quietly turned it on by itself - not at a blistering Level 1 or Level 2, but just warm enough to take the chill off the rim without ever drawing attention to itself.
That was when the whole "buttonless" philosophy clicked for me. I did not need a Level 1 / Level 2 steering-wheel button in the Kia; I needed a continuous closed-loop controller tied to cabin temperature so the button did not have to exist at all.
Why had I hated the idea of Tesla's touchscreen for so many years? - Because I was evaluating it under the assumption that I was the full-time operator of the machine. Tesla designed the entire vehicle around a much bigger product bet: having to drive the car yourself is a temporary legacy state until autonomy is solved.
Once you design backwards from that end-state, two things happen:
- When FSD is driving, taking your eyes off the road for two seconds to tap a screen is no longer a safety hazard. And to give Tesla credit where it is due, even when you do drive manually, they did not repeat the Ford Focus mistake: your speed sits right in your peripheral vision at the top-right corner of the screen, the climate temperature targets stay pinned to the bottom bar where muscle memory can find them, and the steering wheel still has two tactile 4-way scroll-wheel joysticks, customisable buttons around your thumbs, and a turn-signal stalk on the column.
- In a daily point-A-to-point-B drive, almost every button you used to press was just manual ceremony. I stopped carrying a physical wallet years ago - Australia has been effectively cashless for a long time - so the only two things left in my pockets were my phone and my car keys. Now it is just my phone. I walk up to the car, pull the door handle (Button #1), and sit down. It recognises my phone, loads my profile, and automatically moves the seat, mirrors, steering wheel, and even the motorised air-conditioning vents to my exact positions. I click the seatbelt buckle (Button #2), which tells the car I am ready to go, tap my destination, and let FSD take over. When I arrive, I unbuckle - which automatically shifts the car into Park - step out, and walk five metres away while it locks itself.
The door handle and the seatbelt buckle - those are the only two buttons you need to know. Once you enter the destination, everything else between my driveway and the supermarket is handled by the car itself.
Act IV: The Architecture Punchline - Why Grok Worked and Why Enterprise AI Fails
"Of course," I hear you saying, "what about voice commands? Cars have had voice buttons on the steering wheel for many years!" - Sure, and I hated almost all of them.
Until recently, I barely touched Tesla's built-in voice button outside of opening the glovebox. For starters, English is not my first language, and pre-LLM voice recognition was hopeless with my accent on local Australian names. Asking it to navigate to Coles supermarket (C-O-L-E-S) worked maybe five times out of ten; the rest of the time it heard "Cold" or went looking for "Kohl's". Worse still was my phonebook. Pretty much the only person I ever call over a regular cellular voice call today is my wife, and her contact entry in my phone is saved as Camomile :) - with an old-school colon-and-bracket smiley face at the end. Any pre-LLM integrated voice parser I tried failed to resolve "Call Camomile" against Camomile :).
Then, about half a year ago, Tesla added Grok to the cabin. At first, it was basically ChatGPT circa 2023 bolted into the dashboard: fun to chat with on a long drive, completely unable to touch the car.
With the recent updates, however, Grok crossed the line from chatbot to operator. Now you can hold the mic button (or just say "Hey Grok"), have a normal conversation to research a place, say "take me there", and it pushes the destination straight into navigation. You can ask it to bump up the air-conditioning temperature or call your wife regardless of what punctuation lives in her contact card. Better yet, on a complex piece of machinery whose software mutates every few weeks over the air, Grok acts as an interactive tutor: you can ask "Does the car have feature X? How do I use it? I am stuck, what do I do?" and it will explain the behaviour and pop open the exact Settings menu pane on the screen so you can flip the toggle yourself.
Pause for a second and ask the systems-engineering question: Why was Tesla able to turn a passive LLM into a full cabin co-pilot via a routine over-the-air software update?
Now, I am not in the car-building business, and I know every modern car has plenty of digital buses under the skin. But Tesla's decade-old bet - that the car would eventually drive itself and therefore every single subsystem, right down to the air-conditioning vent vanes and seat heaters, had to be electronically actuated and software-controlled rather than tied to mechanical sliders - handed them the exact foundational platform that agentic AI requires. When the LLM brain finally arrived in 2025-2026, all the actuators and state APIs were already sitting there waiting for it.
And that brings me back to the Kia dealership and its 150th-generation crooked photocopy.
Right now, I watch many companies trying to "adopt AI" the Ford Focus / Kia way: they take legacy business processes held together by manual handoffs, tribal knowledge, and humans re-typing paper forms into desktop terminals, and they bolt an LLM chat widget on top. Then they wonder why their expensive new AI can only summarise meetings instead of actually operating the business.
You cannot bolt an AI agent onto mechanical linkages. Before AI can reason over how your company runs - let alone safely mutate and operate your workflows - you have to do the unglamorous platform work Tesla did ten years ago. That does not mean becoming "AI-first" as a slogan; it means making your business processes clearly documented, machine-readable, and API-first down to the last air vent. Once every state transition and actuator in your organisation is exposed as a clean, software-addressable interface, plugging an LLM on top to orchestrate it is just an over-the-air update.
In the end, I did not really wean myself off buttons - Tesla just turned them into an API, and then they stopped mattering. If your enterprise processes still start with a 150th-generation crooked photocopy, no AI model is going to save you. It will just re-type the paper faster.
P.S. Why my AI-adopter engineer friends still reply with a flat "okay" when I tell them my car drives itself - and why some breakthroughs have to be felt in the driver's seat before your brain believes they exist - is a story for the next post.
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