My first test drive experience with an electric car was not as pleasant as I expected. I was not comfortable with regenerative braking, and my wife got seasick during our first trip. She also scratched the wheel while parking despite all the electronic aids. However, the 0% APR offer, positive recommendations from our friends, and the perfect experience with the dealership—who told us not to worry about the wheel and to take our time making the decision, even allowing us to take a longer test drive when we needed it—helped us make the decision.

I used to drive a lot of different cars in the past, living in different parts of the world, from the Daewoo Lanos, my first car, to the long-wheelbase V8 BMW 7 Series. I also grew up in a culture where car ownership is a part of “manliness,” so I can do a lot of small car service jobs myself, like changing brake discs or spark plugs, sensors under the car, or electric actuators in the cabin. I know a lot of different things about cars and can discuss them for hours. Top Gear was my favorite TV show, and I still follow a couple of prominent car YouTubers. So by all means I can be qualified as ‘petrolhead’.

Two days after the delivery day, I finally understood the depth of propaganda and marketing in the car world. Cars are a very, very important part of human culture. Human culture loves complex mechanical things. Check out this collector of vintage lighters, for example, and you will understand what a big thing smoking was in the past and what sophisticated, beautiful devices we’ve made around smoking. And the role of cars and transportation is much bigger than that of smoking—so big that smoking was allowed for women before they had the right to drive cars.

I found that I drove a perfectly solved car. It’s quiet. It’s smooth. I have infinite acceleration in a family-sized SUV—the first time since I owned an Infiniti (since then I’ve owned BMW and Jaguar) that I don’t subconsciously listen to the engine noises, by which I can tell the engine is running smoothly and I won’t have a trip to the service soon. The right music plays right after I enter the car, without the media-selection dance with Bluetooth devices.

Yes, I can still seek status or some specific driving experience, but to be honest 99.5 % of my rides are among rural English towns where wealth show-offs are despised, speed limits are harsh, and roads are narrow. I’m a grown man who’s been in a few car accidents, and the last thing I want in my life is to hurt anyone while driving, so I follow the rules and think about safety. That means I would experience zero difference from a Porsche GT3, except I’d have to sit lower, be hated more, have less space for my gym bags, endure more noise, and contend with a less responsive screen—better not to think about service costs.

So that’s a phenomenon of the solved car: a pleasant but not overindulging experience that just a few years ago required you to buy a much more expensive car but is now available for less. It’s an encounter with a thing that is just right; yes, you can strive for more (auto-closing doors, in my case), but it’s perfect enough.

No one ever told me this. Aside from owners of this specific brand and niche bloggers (who are easily dismissed as fanboys), not a single YouTuber or magazine ever admitted that the car had been “solved.” Reviews always rely on a manufactured sense of intrigue: “Nokia is working on the N900 to strike back,” or “no Blackberry user would ever dream of ditching the keyboard,” or “older drivers find touchscreens confusing.” And so, the single greatest milestone in automotive history was written between the lines of countless articles and videos, yet never allowed to be the final word.

I recall reading automotive journals and laughing at grown men earnestly debating how the new generation of cars is 24 millimeters wider than the old (it’s two centimeters, dude—barely noticeable even for penis size, let alone for a car). So much energy was spent arguing details that matter to no one but enthusiasts. What will these people do in the era of solved cars? Remember the mobile-phone bloggers who were in constant hysterics when the first iPhone arrived? Now we all hold similar black slabs, and most differences are in software—and even that is so alike that the ecstatic energy once poured into device forums has dissipated like thermodynamic radiation. When did you last read a serious mobile-device comparison? I can’t recall either—and I’m an Android owner.

When I try to understand why people resist change—why they mourn the obsolescence of Nokia or reject futuristic smoking devices with more computing power than a 50-year-old spacecraft—I realize we’re worshiping the Great Machine God.

We like moving mechanisms—complicated devices we can understand—more than algorithms for machines created by other machines running on magic sand wafers we can’t grasp. That’s why a Rolex costs more than the first quartz watches, which basically solved timekeeping and stripped away every complication. Casio makes a perfect, solved watch, yet people pay crazy money for devices that are worse in every way except the makers’ devotion to the Great Machine God.

And all the ICE-versus-EV debates come down to the same smug refrain: “With regular servicing, my car will last forever,” a boast that sets the driver apart as a true caretaker and a proper man, unlike those “EV gays” (the same folks who once sneered at iPhone owners). Beneath the bluster, part of every man still longs to genuflect before the Machine God, and rightly so—his blessings have carried our species far. His priests—automotive journalists—shriek in chorus each time the Sand God stakes another inch of our daily lives.

But setting religious wars aside, we know that all cars have been computers since the 90s, and the last thing I want in my life is a computer made by Germans or the French, well known for their computer science advancements in the past 30 years. The Sand God won with little steps long ago, and we got to where we are now, with a computer on wheels no matter what kind of drivetrain it has. And the Sand God prefers electricity to diesel and oil.