I agree with you about wanting a car without pointless stuff bolted on. When it comes to the things required to actually move the car, there's an interesting inverse relationship between visible levers and internal complexity though. Each lever removed is moving complexity from your brain to some physical system. Like an automatic transmission removes the gear shift and adds the more complex automatic transmission. In the limit, one can imagine the "simplest" interface of a virtually empty self-driving pod, which of course is actually an extremely complex system.