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.
If you didn’t already know bmw had lost their design edge, you clearly haven’t seen the XM or their ugly ass plastic grills on electric vehicles that don’t even need grills.
I guess though I could see these being a novelty security feature for hubcaps that you don’t want to be removed too easily. Beyond that it’s just hostile and or dumb.
Idgaf about car design in general, but I definitely noticed when beamers started to look like Angry Birds pigs, they look sooo stupid.
BMW pinned so much of their visual identity on their kidney grilles. Literally decades of variations on the theme, mainly just getting bigger and bigger. And now grilles are completely redundant with ev’s and BMW hasn’t got a clue what to do about it. The lack of foresight and imagination is stunning.
I wouldn’t even mind if the fake grills looked decent, but they are just ugly. They seem to be thrashing around with what to do trying all sorts of ugly things.
If this picks up, the people you’d want to not be able to remove these too easily will be the first to have the adequate tools to remove them easily.