My toaster is done. It arrived done. It will be done until it dies, at which point I'll buy another done toaster. This is how most things work and it's fine. Nobody has ever woken up to discover their toaster learned a new trick overnight.
My couch is the same couch it was the day the delivery guys scraped it against the doorframe. My fridge keeps things cold at the same temperature it did in 2019. My Honda Accord, back when I had one, was mechanically identical on mile 89,000 as it was on mile 12. It was a finished object. Reliable, predictable, and completely static.
Then I bought a car that gets software updates and the whole concept of "finished" started to feel weird.
The first update I noticed was small. The backup camera got slightly better. Not dramatically better, not like someone swapped the camera out. Just a little sharper, a little more responsive. I hadn't asked for this. I hadn't scheduled a service appointment. I woke up and my car could see better than it could yesterday. Like it had been doing eye exercises in the garage.
That was strange. Good strange, but strange.
Then the navigation got smoother. Then Autopilot started handling curves differently. Then one morning the whole interface looked different and I spent ten minutes in my driveway figuring out where they moved the seat heater button. Which was annoying, actually. I didn't ask anyone to move my seat heater button. I knew where it was. It was fine where it was.
And this is the thing about owning something that's in progress. It's exciting and it's mildly unsettling and sometimes it's genuinely irritating, often within the same week.
You know that feeling when your phone updates and the keyboard is slightly different and for three days you're hitting the wrong letters? Scale that up to something you drive at 70 miles per hour. It's a different kind of adaptation. You develop a relationship with the car that's more like a relationship with a person than a relationship with an appliance. It changes. You adjust. Sometimes you like the changes. Sometimes you spend a week complaining about the changes and then quietly admit they were probably better.
I've been thinking about this because someone asked me recently if my car was "good" and I didn't know how to answer. Good compared to when? It's different than it was six months ago. Some things are better. The Autopilot is noticeably more confident in rain. The audio system got some kind of spatial update that I didn't understand but my music sounds slightly more like music now. The app loads faster. Small things. Real things.
But also, they changed how the wipers auto-detect rain and for about two months it was worse. Objectively worse. The wipers would kick on during a clear day because a shadow confused them, or they wouldn't kick on when it was actively raining because I guess the car thought it was fine. Then another update and the wipers got better again. Better than they were originally, actually. But there were two months there where I was manually overriding my own car's rain judgment like a backseat driver to my own windshield.
At a traditional car company, the wipers would have just been what they were. Forever. If they were mediocre, they'd be mediocre until you sold the car. You'd never know they could be better because better wasn't an option. The car was finished.
There's something to be said for finished, honestly. Finished is predictable. Finished doesn't rearrange your dashboard at 2 AM. Finished doesn't make you wonder if your car is going to be slightly different when you get in tomorrow morning. Finished is a contract: this is what you bought, and this is what you'll have.
"In progress" is a different contract entirely. It says: this is what you have today, and we're going to keep working on it, and you're going to have to trust us, and sometimes that trust will be rewarded and sometimes you're going to be mad about your seat heater button.
But here's where it gets interesting. Other companies started saying "in progress" too, except they didn't mean it the same way. When a traditional car company says a feature is "coming in a future update" they usually mean they cut it from the launch to hit a deadline and they'll add it eventually, probably, if the business case holds up. It's an apology dressed up as a promise.
When Tesla says something is in progress, they mean someone is literally working on it right now, tonight, and the fix or the feature or the improvement will show up on your car at some point between next Tuesday and eight months from now. You won't get a say in when. You'll just wake up and your car will be different. Like elves, but for software. Slightly unpredictable elves who sometimes make questionable UI decisions.
I told a friend who drives a BMW about the update that improved my car's ability to read speed limit signs and he stared at me like I'd told him my car had learned to whistle. His BMW, a very nice car, a car that cost more than mine, will read speed limit signs exactly as well on the day he sells it as it did on the day he bought it. Which is fine. But the idea that it could get better and just doesn't seemed to genuinely bother him once he thought about it.
That's the shift. Once you know a car can improve, a car that doesn't feels like a choice. A deliberate one. Like someone decided to stop working on your car the day it left the factory, even though the technology to keep going clearly exists.
I think about the people at Tesla who push these updates. Somewhere in Austin or Palo Alto or wherever, a team of engineers ships a change, and overnight, hundreds of thousands of cars on driveways and in garages all over the world quietly become something slightly different than what they were the day before. Nobody asked. Nobody scheduled an appointment. The cars just... update. While their owners sleep.
If you described this to someone in 1995 they would assume you were describing a science fiction movie, probably one with a dark twist where the cars eventually turn evil. But it's just Tuesday. It's just a software update. Your car is slightly better today and you might not even notice.
My car is not finished. It might never be finished. I find that mostly exciting, occasionally annoying, and completely unprecedented.
I still miss where the seat heater button used to be, though.