[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.