BMW Patents Proprietary Screws That Only Dealerships Can Remove

Not the first product to do this. Jura coffee machines also have their own oval-ish fasteners.

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.

Even if it were fairly specific, I’d be surprised if a similar tool couldn’t be 3D printed with DMLS. It’s possible that due to torsion requirements it would have to be molded, which could be much more expensive.

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.

… So they didn’t want to just pay Bryce Fastener to give them their own “proprietary” screw? They’ve been in this market for decades with “custom” security screws for vendors, among other things.

https://www.brycefastener.com/

That already is old news, lots of manufacturers do that.

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.