When you buy a new car, you’re getting a finished product. Its gears shift effortlessly, its brakes are tight, and the seats are stainless.

Of course, a car isn’t born. It doesn’t just arrive fully-formed.

Humans and machines assembled it in a factory, taking 66 person-hours to complete. And that assembly was built upon multiple parts which themselves were assembled somewhere else. And nearly every one of those parts was assembled by even smaller parts in an entirely different location.

So when you get in your car and shift into drive, it feels like you’re in a singular thing. And yes, in a sense, that car is a singular object. It is also a product of thousands of smaller parts with hundreds of hours of labor.

But it isn’t the automation process that confuses us: it’s this dual identity. That car can be one thing and yet composed of thousands of things.

The difference between a car built at a Ford assembly plant in Detroit and the Hot Wheels my son plays with is massive. We all know they’re different. But in a simple-minded way, they’re identical. They’re both cars. Defining them exclusively as singular objects erases tremendous differences.

We certainly can make a car that is truly only ever one thing. All it takes is a mold and some plastic. One piece; a complete thing by itself. That, too is a car.

Now, of course, its wheels won’t move. And in that sense is even less like a car than the Hot Wheels. But to a toddler, the imagination can fill that gap quickly. That plastic car can win at Indy in record time.

But when we need to take a car to work, get a loved one to the hospital, or to go visit our families, we’ll all rely on the one assembled of thousands of parts. The one we all know as “the real car.”