cross-posted from : https://lemmus.org/post/20199206
Adafruit: From Ultimate Driving Machine to Ultimate Rent-Seeking Machine: The BMW Logo Screw Patent.
If you haven’t already heard, BMW’s R&D teams have been busy “innovating.” Unfortunately, they aren’t focusing on the things that actually matter—like stellar engine performance or the legendary driving dynamics that gearheads love. Instead, the C-suite execs decided that the best use of their engineering budget was to design a proprietary security screw specifically intended to prevent BMW drivers from fixing their own cars.
The thing is. This is an arms race. The service providers need to source the tools, and the tools or copies will be available from various vendors.
It’s mildly inconvenient at worst. So it’s not even efficient evil, it’s stupid evil.
Since the screwhead is ~50% hollow, I wonder how the metrics on durability and longevity go.
It’ll also be cheap evil.