That isn't what modeling is. A complex process like driving a car or flying a plane, or doing physics for that matter, would involve the application of many different models. A better description of "modeling" in regard to driving a car is what your conscious intellect does to try and understand how you drive a car.

Modeling is a self-aware process, whereas driving a car is effectively autonomic (no pun intended) most of the time. When you need models is when you need to make a driving decision, and then you need to model the outcomes of those choices based on a unified understanding of how the current situation projects onto whatever your model recognizes as relevant or important. Do you have time to brake, or must you swerve? If the conditions are slippery, does that change the relevant model? Should you include in your model the results of head-on versus glancing collisions? This is the part that conveys an intellectual understanding of the situation, and that's why I said that a baby begins making models at the point when its intelligence starts trying to understand its surroundings-- it knows how to cry long before that. Instinctive reflexes do not require any models. If you reflexively pull your hand off a hot stove, is that because you "understand" heat?
You are not describing the absence of modeling in driving, you are describing your own model of the act of driving.

The second sentence is not informed by the first sentence, as the first sentence is obvious to the point of meaninglessness. The second sentence is actually saying something about models-- they do indeed attempt to unify similarities, as has been said. Nor does that fact in any support your claims that we are not in fact applying models when we participate in these behaviors.

It is easy because you are not saying anything at all. I'm afraid nothing you've said sounds in any way like anything more than "everything we do involves doing something". This is our starting point before we begin to understand, it is not a moment of insight.

I believe I answered that, but I suppose it is an important enough point to bear repeating. We never understand toys, we only understand our models of toys. The very word "toy" involves a replacement of something real with something conceptual. Even if you claim that a toy is defined by how we use one, you are also doing a similar replacement, because if we trip over one, are we "using" it? You are modeling the meaning of toy even as you observe the behavior you are using to define the toy. A toy is a bunch of atoms, it has no idea it is a toy-- you are modeling it as a toy, and are simply choosing the parameters of your model (behavioral, in your case, but this is merely one choice of a way to model something).

The key point is, the human mind cannot understand reality any more than the word "toy" can be a toy. (The word "word" can be a word expressly because it is already a concept, i.e., already a model.) All we ever understand are words and concepts, i.e., models. Models are that which we can understand, and that's why we create them. That's simply because a mind can only understand what a mind can create. Water is water, rock is rock, and a rock cannot be made of water. So it is with the creations of our minds-- a mind only understands its own products. But this is easily mistaken for understanding the reality when the model yields a particularly good simulation of the aspects of reality it is intended to unify and predict. Indeed, our language is lazy and we say we understand the reality-- but no, we do not, we understand our model of reality, and as we have no other option, we call that understanding reality.

We don't "understand" the plastic model either, it is simply another real thing. What we understand is certain unified conceptual aspects of both the real plastic model and the real solar system, and we draw the connection, the unification. The plastic model (insofar as it replaces the solar system, not insofar as it is its own reality) gives us a clearer path to that understanding, but even the plastic model has many elements that are not part of what we mean by our solar system model (it is made of plastic molecules, etc.). It is our mind that makes the simplification, not the plastic spheres (which are of course no closer to spheres than actual planets are).

How does anything else? One can push around a toy without having intelligence about toys-- the latter comes from unification. Do we kick a ball because it is fun to feel the sensation, or does the fun come from noticing where the ball goes, and trying to attain mastery over certain repetitive tasks? Do we not generate a model of "cause and effect", and thereby feel that we are causing the ball to move, which connects to the concept of power over the ball, which is a model that is fun to apply and test? Via the repetition, we seek the unification that gives us "intelligence about toys", and the latter is the source of the fun.

I have to break here for space limitations...

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Logic is the grammar of truth.

Meaning and absolute certainty are incompatible, and profound meaning and absolute certainty are profoundly incompatible.

The only thing intelligence is capable of is recognizing itself.