[constantcrying]

>My car is simple

No, it isn't. It is extremely complicated, containing two different mechanisms for propulsions, complex mechanical linkages for those propulsion mechanisms and steering, a deep web of electrical components including large software projects, augmenting the driving characteristics and providing essential safety features and much, much more.

It was painstakingly designed by thousands of engineers, who tried to take everything into account and to present to you something which to you "feels right", although you have zero idea about why it does.

Calling such a thing simple is completely ridiculous. As if the thousands of engineers were just superfluous and you could design a car by slapping together some components and have it work flawlessly. This is a highly integrated system, where a change to any single one component can influence all other components in very strange ways. That it is reliable, is not because it is simple, it is reliable because someone else has dealt with that complexity for you and spent an enormous amount of effort to get it right.

To be honest the arrogance of software developers is astounding. Looking at an enormously complicated project, which had to take into account a vast array of requirements and had to deal with all the complexity of mechanical, electrical and software systems working together and then going "that is simple, we should do simple things like they do", because the engineers working on it managed to hide all of that from you, speaks of so much arrogance. Just open up the hood and look at it. Look at it.

[mhnthrow]

What's described in the article is the perception of simplicity from a user perspective. The relationship with the car is simple. The surface area the user interfaces with for common tasks is simple. The overall concept the user has in their mind of how to operate a car is simple.

This user experience is the result of all the hard work done by the thousands of engineers and others involved. You seem offended on their behalf, but what the article is doing is actually praising their success. It doesn't describe anything about the internals of the car or the work done to design it, only the final _feature set_.

IMO this is just marketing content. A company wants to distinguish itself by claiming to offer a small, high-quality and easy-to-understand feature set that matters to a certain customers, instead of trading more functionality on paper for less "simplicity".

It might be true that they've found the exact right balance for their market. Or maybe they have constraints that prevent them from developing a broader range of features in parallel and that this is just spin.

I think it's not really about cars, is all I'm saying. The car is just a throwaway metaphor, and not a really great one.

[gsck]

I dont think they are calling the car a simple object, I think they are referring to the fact that the car does one thing and does it good.

The cart isn't trying to be a one man band with all sorts of bells and whistles. Its a car that turns on and goes forward, which is all you expect of a car.

[pkolaczk]

Compared to many other ICE cars, Toyota hybrid drivechain is relatively simple. There is no turbocharger, no double-mass wheel, no starter engine, no DPF, the transmission has no other moving parts than just a few rotating planetary gears (constantly engaged), no clutch, no microclutches, no momentum converter. There are fewer moving parts than in a manual transmission, and forget any other classic automatic transmission. E.g. in comparison, DSG complexity is atrocious (and unreliability famous). In exchange there are 2 electric engines and a battery - but that’s all quite simple and reliable technology.