My five-year-old (car) is learning to drive

The car, not the kid. The kid just pushes the button.

Back in the spring, our Model Y was in the shop and Tesla gave us a newer loaner—one running the latest version of Full Self-Driving, where a single button starts the car driving itself. My six-year-old figured this out immediately and appointed himself launch director: once he was buckled into his seat in the back, I wasn't allowed to touch the button until he gave the word. "Okay Dad—press it." A whole ceremony, maybe five seconds long, and he ran it like NASA.

Not the radio. Not the window switches. The self-driving button. To him, a car driving itself isn’t science fiction—it’s an appliance, and pressing “go” is the best job in it. (He’s been unimpressed with my driving for a while now.)

I’ve been thinking about that button lately, because our own car—a 2021 Model Y, five years old this year—is about to get it. The button, and the smarter brain behind it.

The upgrade nobody expected old cars to get

In late June, Tesla started rolling out FSD v14 “Lite” to Hardware 3 cars—the older computer that cars like mine shipped with. Last week it started deploying in South Korea, the first time older-hardware cars outside North America have gotten it. The interesting part is how they did it: v14 Lite is distilled from the full v14 stack that runs on newer cars, using the new models to teach the old computer how to behave. My car’s five-year-old chip is essentially getting tutored by its younger sibling. And per the release notes, the update brings the newer cars’ party tricks along with the brain: speed profiles, arrival options, and—the one that matters in this house—starting self-driving from park. The button.

To be clear about the ceiling here: it’s still a supervised, hands-on system, and Tesla has said my car’s hardware probably can’t reach unsupervised self-driving—it has an eighth of the memory bandwidth of the newer computer. So I’m not planning to nap in the driver’s seat.

But I’m not ready to carve “probably” into stone, either. The amount of intelligence you can squeeze out of a fixed amount of compute has been roughly doubling every year lately—ARK’s research attributes nearly half of AI’s plummeting costs to algorithmic gains alone, software learning to do more with the same silicon. And v14 Lite is itself proof of that trend: it exists because Tesla found a way to pour a bigger model’s smarts into a smaller cup. Nobody was promising that two years ago. Either way, “your 2021 car is about to drive noticeably better than it did in 2025” is a sentence that shouldn’t make sense—and here we are.

Nothing we grew up with worked this way

Think about everything a millennial ever owned. My N64 played exactly the same Mario Kart in 2005 that it did in 1998—that was the whole deal, and we loved it for that. Car depreciation wasn’t just financial, it was functional. You bought a thing, and then you watched it slowly become less of a thing.

The Model Y has run the opposite direction. In five years it’s gained features I didn’t pay for and couldn’t have imagined at signing. And look—there’s plenty to be cynical about with Tesla these days, and I’ve got my own list. But on this specific promise, “the car will keep getting better,” they’ve delivered for five straight years. That’s worth reiterating, because it’s quietly becoming the most important spec on any EV: not the range, not the 0–60, but whether the company behind it will still be shipping updates when the car is old enough for kindergarten.

That’s the real lesson if you’re shopping for an EV today. You’re not just buying a car—you’re buying a decade-long software relationship with the company that made it. Ask whether they’ll be around, and still care about your model, in year five. My car is proof it can happen. It’s on every other automaker to prove it’s not the exception.

Somewhere in the next few weeks, an update will download overnight, and the car in my garage will wake up better at its job. And some school morning soon, a small voice from the back seat gets his countdown back—buckle click, then "Okay Dad, press it." As far as he's concerned, that's just how cars work.

He might be right on schedule. I might be the last driver in the family.