I used to own a car that had a mysterious group of decorative decals on its dashboard. Finding them pointless (and annoying) I decided to peel them off.

To my surprise, I noticed that underneath each decal was a recessed opening and the end of a metal lever was accessible in each. With a little experimentation, I was able to determine that the levers allowed me to open and close the heater/ac duct baffles so that I could easily redirect airflow through the car's environmental system. By throwing the switches in different combinations, I could quickly redirect hot or cold air to lower/upper, front/back and passenger/driver vents. It took a while to figure out how to do this, but once I had the muscle memory hooked in it could easily be done, even while driving in heavy traffic.

Why had the manufacturers gone to the trouble of hiding a useful capability from the user? The only answer I could come up with was that the manufacturer had marketed a more capable but complex a/c system in their more expensive models, but had cut expenses by using the same vent control manifolds on both the economy and luxury versions of the car. The purpose of the decals was to hide the fact that both the economy and luxury models were equipped the same way, but that the former had that enhanced feature hidden from the customer.