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.

    • toynbee@lemmy.world
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      2 hours ago

      Haha, nice.

      Funnily enough I’ve been talking to people a lot about screw types recently. My wife was taking some hardware out of the house and cursing the varied kinds of screws used during installation; a friend and co-worker has been obsessed with the varieties ever since I met him; and my six year old found some of the screws dropped by my wife and asked why they were different.