For example, the Passat 3B and later platforms introduced proprietary screws for the wheels and brakes, so you weren't able to change them yourself.

Same for all kinds of sensors that will go rogue when the car is turned off and you change a sensor on the engine. All firmware gradually was modified each generation to allow less modifications and less self repairs, and less repairs by third party workshops.

Also, the Golf 2 platform for example had a very sturdy engine running beyond 1 Mio km easily. What do you think happened with the Golf 3 engine design? They made the camshaft structurally weaker, so the engine will blow up more easily. The rest of the engine is almost identical. Talk about being bad at hiding planned obsolescence.

There's many more examples like this, acrosd every manufacturer. The real reason why there is so many people on race tracks driving old cars is because they're easier to modify, easier to maintain, and easier to buy replacement parts for.

It's ridiculous if you think about it, and really frustrating that there is no legislative intervention against this.

BTW, none of this is surprising from BMW. They were the first to try a subscription model for in-car features like Carplay... Or seat heaters. https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a30139034/bmw-apple-carpla... and https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/bmw-relents-on-heated-seat-...

Either way, this is hardly a case where others will be prevented from removing these screws for very long, even if they were to try to enforce that others couldn’t produce a similar tool because of the logo.

It is a sad state of affairs when the only way to attempt to get others to use your services is to attempt to block them. But, unlike attempting to remove DRM encryption, where it might be a challenge to reverse engineer, a physical object of a single standard material can be easily scanned and reproduced.

In fact, it's really quite amazing that car manufacturers, generational artisans of the vendor lock-in have not been doing this at a far greater scale. Think of all those generic screws they could be charging $50 each for. No one buys or doesn't buy cars based on the screw heads. If they did they'd also reject cars that require thousands in probes and an annual subscription to use them, and they don't.

It's not even that they don't have their own screws made by tier 1/2s, as if you look in a car, many seemingly-ordinary screws do in fact have the brand and part number stamped in the heads - presumably for stock and quality control purposes during manufacture.

But FTA:

BMW really does want to use these to stop people from working on their own cars. It spells out in the patent that "the shape of the engagement recesses prevents the screw from being loosened or tightened using common counter-drive structures, e.g. by unauthorized persons." That's straight from BMW.

The second sentence is key: "unauthorized" can be woke-speak for thief, and this device doesn't seem to require a single key per car which has been a PITA for VW/BMW in the past.

The first sentence can then be edited to simply:

BMW really does want to use these to stop people from removing wheels from cars they don't own.

Before you object the thieves will just go get the tool: professionals yes, opportunistic, no.

This is enough of a real issue in some places there's a discount on theft insurance for car contents and parts when you have wheel theft prevention devices (e.g. wheel or hub locks). Granted, the insurers might not see this as actuarially meaningful, it might just be extra revenue from people who care about their wheels, but then you'd expect to see it everywhere.

I really don't see the point of this, it won't take a year for that bit to appear on shelves at the local hardware store if people need it. I have bit sets containing ever imaginable "security" bit, security torx are pretty much standard in set now. So are the weird flathead with the middle cut out. You almost can't buy an iFixIt kit without Apples stupid pentalob bit. This is just another bit to add to the collection, BMW will achieve nothing by introducing it.

The design is neat though, using their logo at the head of the screw is sort of cute. Completely unnecessary, but cute.

Western manufacturers: increasing lock-in to preserve revenues of middlemen

I'm not defending BMW here but there was a similar freak-out a few years ago about heated seats requiring monthly payments that ended up being a giant nothing burger.

https://www.brycefastener.com/

Original Source (per the HN Guidelines):

https://carbuzz.com/bmw-roundel-logo-screw-patent/

(Also has the drawings of the screws from the patents.)