BMW resale values make it very clear: these cars are actively hostile (in many many ways) to their owners the second they go out of warranty. Pity, their interiors are lovely. In the long term, is this strategy going to work out for them? I won't buy another one. I know... anecdata :)
Probably more of a gimmick than a strategy. In the grand scheme of things in cars a pretty minor one too. Replacing a panel and a bolt vs. replacing more complex components that have proprietary firmware, wiring harnesses, 3d printed/molded components with very complex design and tolerances, etc. A lot of that is business as usual across the industry.
The key issue here is that repairability is currently not really factored into the sales value of the car. That's a bit naive of course because it actually does impact the second hand value of a car. For example, MG makes nice cars but they have a bit of a reputation for needing lots of repairs under warranty. That reduces their second hand value and therefore also impacts their new value. You can get some really good deals on second hand ones. But the repairs might add up. That's why the second hand value is so low.
Lease companies buying new BMWs to lease them out to high salaried executives expect to be able to sell these things on 3-5 years later and get a decent second hand value. If the car then has a reputation for being a bit difficult and expensive to work on (like MG), that is going to reflect in the second hand price. And the lease price. Mostly lease companies just pass that on in the lease price. That works for BMW until more competitive vehicles show up that can be leased at a lower cost.
A few quirky bolts won't move the needle here. They aren't going to get rich selling them or the tools that go with them. It's just a bit of minor friction for car repair shops. If they see enough BMWs in their shop, they'll get the damn screws and tools. It's not that different than Apple using custom screws on their devices. Every phone repair shop has the tools now.
A friend of mine used to buy the first model of any new and hot BMW. He'd know the specs better than the sales people and he spent a fortune on them.
They also spent more time in the shop with electrical gremlins than any car that I've ever seen. One of our employees insisted on a Mini, which is also BMW as their lease car. No other car we had had that much trouble. BMW is a crap brand that used to make very good cars. Mercedes is getting there. Neither of these will survive in the longer term if they don't somehow get back to their roots: making safe and reliable vehicles with good resale value. But for both companies the problems are in the same domain: they never got the hang of software.
> Neither of these will survive in the longer term
German government will do everything possible to prevent these companies from failing, no matter how bad the situation gets. This means that current management can simply apply the "next quarter" strategy without any realistic downside.
BMW used to be extremely good and very repairable/upgradeable.
They have clearly lost their way. Seems like a fundamental loss of confidence in their ability to produce leading technology, and instead feeling like they must defensively focus on blocking and extracting maximum funds from customers, both with costly "authorized-only" repairs and subscriptions for heated seats.
Reminded me of the "shim" discussion about BMW motorcycles and part authenticity from the 1974 classic "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance": http://www.hilarygallo.com/the-zen-shim-question/
This patent came from the design department. Some dude looked at the logo and said, “Huh, we could make a screw from this.” The legal team then took it and made a design patent.
If you guys want, I can message him and ask about the grand conspiracy behind it but you might be disappointed.
And that would violate both BMWs Trademark and Patent, which at least in Switzerland could mean having to pay BMW damages and get fined for importing counterfeit goods.
good thing that it would be a chinese copy, and thus, not subject to switzerland law. So i wonder if chinese law recognize this patent/trademark for a screw?
Reminds me of the 2-hole "snake eye" or "pig nose" screw heads you sometimes see in bathrooms or elevators. I have several of the bits for these since they come with every one of those n>20 -piece screwdriver bit sets, but I've never actually had to undo one. I guess that goes for most of the oddball bits those sets come with.
If they really wanted to screw (pun, sorry) with repairability (and at significant cost to themselves), I guess they could start making their own taps and dies for nonstandard threads you can't buy anywhere else. Wouldn't stop them from being unscrewed, though.
This feels like they want to use trademark law to prevent third-party products. You can't legally produce the screws without baiscally copying the BMW logo onto it. I don't know if a similar argument would hold water for the drivers though.
IIRC in Europe at least that doesn't work because now your third party has the defence of necessity. They didn't want to use your protected mark, but it was necessary or else their product wouldn't work, so, the protection doesn't apply.
In the USA, in Sega v. Accolade the judge ruled that you can't use a trademark to block access to your stuff. The context was, the Sega Genesis DRM had a check for the string "SEGA" somewhere in the game's ROM; presumably, Sega reasoned that they could license their trademarked name for this purpose to licensed devs and sue makers of unlicensed cartridges for trademark infringement; and did sue Accolade when they attempted to publish unlicensed games for copyright and trademark infringement. The appeals judge overturned an earlier decision in favor of Sega, citing that trademarks can't be used to block what would otherwise be a fair-use act.
Much of Sega v. Accolade was overruled by the DMCA, which explicitly makes defeating DRM a crime in the general case. But the prohibition against using trademarks to gatekeep people performing legal, nonfraudulent activity probably remains and may be cited in future cases.
I'd be interested to know how BMW manufactures those screws. The patterns in the metal in the image suggest the entire hole was drilled out? The deepest part has circular marks inside that looks like the marks left by a facing tool on a lathe or similar. Then I guess the two wedges were inserted and the whole screw faced?
Unlike all the other guesses here, I actually do have experience with manufacturing specialty aerospace fasteners similar in size, shape, complexity, and precision as these. These are most assuredly being manufactured on a specialty tool called a “Swissing Lathe”, or Swiss CNC machine, because that is the machine you always use to make parts like this. It is a multi-headed turret mill combined with a lathe that can continuously feed a piece of long bar stock and continually spit out fasteners. They were invented many years ago to produce extremely high precision small screws for watches, and in fact Citizen is one of the main vendors of these tools to this day. Based on my experience I would expect the cycle time for making this part to be 30 seconds or so.
Here’s a good video that eli5’s the difference between a Swiss screw machine and conventional CNC.
And here’s a video with a high quality soundtrack that shows how the machine combines automatic lathe cuts, mill cuts, and thread rolling without changing machines, swapping cutters, or re-fixturing the work.
The prototypes might be milled and/or produced via additive manufacturing (3D printing.) In production the heads are likely formed via stamping. Here's an old video I remember watching as a kid (Unfortunately quite pixelated) of the Robertson screw being manufactured which has a tapered square profile for the bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Td7GjAMAY7Y (The Acme School of Stuff was awesome for its time and still is.)
CNC Milled and suface brushed. I Think these screws are going to be used in some decorative Panels etc. Would be cost prohibitive to use these all over the Car.
This. It's obviously an interior fastener. Maybe they'll have a cheaper one without the logo for the airbag module or whatever. OEMs have spent untold sums over the year hiding interior trim fasteners using all manner of push and snap fittings. A few low trim vehicles have bucked that trend recently, to much savings of labor and tool/die cost and no apparent ill effect in the mind of consumers. And now everybody is testing the waters.
I don't see any geometry that would be hard for casting or milling, it's slightly more expensive because you can't do it in one go, but you have to lift the toolhead if you mill.
Why not? A properly set up CNC machining center would turn those out by the bucketload. That's precisely the sort of thing that BMW does regularly with exterior details, no reason why they couldn't do it for a batch of bolts.
You don't use CNC for making a billion individual screws. These would have their heads formed by being stamped in a die, just like phillips, robertson, security torx or any other screw heads.
You can make anything on anything. Doesn't make it smart tho.
If this were a production run of a few dozen super high grade aerospace donkey dicks with five shoulders and four pockets, an oil channel, a precisely engineered break point and a 12-step heat treat process I'd say yeah, make it on your Swiss lathe with live tooling or bajillion axis VMC or whatever.
But this looks to be a simple small, probably cosmetic or otherwise low-ish strength stainless or chromed fastener that BMW probably wants a few hundred thousand of. You'll be time, money, labor, frustration, managerial nitpicking, just about everything, ahead to just have the fastener industry and their existing expertise make it for you. The "bespoke" drive, the custom branding, those are all known-knowns to those guys. They'll whip up tooling for their screw machines and fill the same bucket in 1/20th of the time.
Edit: replaced video link with better one. Obviously there's fiddle fucking around they're not showing and they're mix and matching footage of different products but the speed things move once you've got it all set up is broadly accurate. A whole bunch of these steps would be skipped or altered for a stainless fastener.
You will be able to buy a "BMW screwdriver" from China in a couple of weeks. This prevents nothing, it's just annoying and goes to show that BMW is run by dickheads (in case you didn't know yet).
Apple's "pentalobe" screws tell you the same about that company.
I suppose that depends on your definition of “now”. BMW has had a 20 year history of fork lower failures on their adventure bikes. Just search “BMW Fork Failure” and you will find a lot of discussion. Here was a Microsoft friend’s wreck in Alaska, which I believe was one of the earliest ones. Front wheel complete separated while she was riding straight and level on a paved road.
I think this is misunderstood - everybody points out that how evil BMW is for trying to be proprietary, then immediately points out any Chinese factory can produce a compatible tool for pennies - which one is it?
I think this is a pretty good mechanical design in general because:
- large contact surface (like hex or torx)
- no chance of slide-out (like flathead) or torque-out (like Philips)
- you can use a different size screw bit than the screw, and it wont slide around, or destroy your nut like torx does with hex
Which what? I honestly don't understand what the comparison is or what is misunderstood as there is nothing to misunderstand - it's a proprietary screw designed to defeat self/unlicensed repair - FULL STOP. Fuck the technical merit. And the point of mentioning that Chinese factories can produce cheap knock-offs is to demonstrate how absurd of a anti-consumer measure this is.
> everybody points out that how evil BMW is for trying to be proprietary, then immediately points out any Chinese factory can produce a compatible tool for pennies - which one is it?
Just because there's a workaround for an unnecessary annoying thing doesn't mean the thing ceases to be unnecessary and annoying.
An I am pointing out the design has merit from a purely mechanical perspective, and is a very poor method for actually preventing third party repair.
BMW has done some despicable things as pointed out by a recent article, like welding in a pyrotechnic fuse that would kill the battery when the car detected a fault, and which could only be replaced by cutting the factory sealed battery case open, or installing 'theft protection' measurers, which could brick ECUs if an unlicensed repair shop would attempt repairs on the car (which have been known to trigger even when the dealership attempted to fix the issue using official tools)
> An I am pointing out the design has merit from a purely mechanical perspective, and is a very poor method for actually preventing third party repair.
It sounds like you are defending both the design and the decision with nothing said about it being a poor method.
BMW resale values make it very clear: these cars are actively hostile (in many many ways) to their owners the second they go out of warranty. Pity, their interiors are lovely. In the long term, is this strategy going to work out for them? I won't buy another one. I know... anecdata :)
Probably more of a gimmick than a strategy. In the grand scheme of things in cars a pretty minor one too. Replacing a panel and a bolt vs. replacing more complex components that have proprietary firmware, wiring harnesses, 3d printed/molded components with very complex design and tolerances, etc. A lot of that is business as usual across the industry.
The key issue here is that repairability is currently not really factored into the sales value of the car. That's a bit naive of course because it actually does impact the second hand value of a car. For example, MG makes nice cars but they have a bit of a reputation for needing lots of repairs under warranty. That reduces their second hand value and therefore also impacts their new value. You can get some really good deals on second hand ones. But the repairs might add up. That's why the second hand value is so low.
Lease companies buying new BMWs to lease them out to high salaried executives expect to be able to sell these things on 3-5 years later and get a decent second hand value. If the car then has a reputation for being a bit difficult and expensive to work on (like MG), that is going to reflect in the second hand price. And the lease price. Mostly lease companies just pass that on in the lease price. That works for BMW until more competitive vehicles show up that can be leased at a lower cost.
A few quirky bolts won't move the needle here. They aren't going to get rich selling them or the tools that go with them. It's just a bit of minor friction for car repair shops. If they see enough BMWs in their shop, they'll get the damn screws and tools. It's not that different than Apple using custom screws on their devices. Every phone repair shop has the tools now.
A friend of mine used to buy the first model of any new and hot BMW. He'd know the specs better than the sales people and he spent a fortune on them.
They also spent more time in the shop with electrical gremlins than any car that I've ever seen. One of our employees insisted on a Mini, which is also BMW as their lease car. No other car we had had that much trouble. BMW is a crap brand that used to make very good cars. Mercedes is getting there. Neither of these will survive in the longer term if they don't somehow get back to their roots: making safe and reliable vehicles with good resale value. But for both companies the problems are in the same domain: they never got the hang of software.
> Neither of these will survive in the longer term
German government will do everything possible to prevent these companies from failing, no matter how bad the situation gets. This means that current management can simply apply the "next quarter" strategy without any realistic downside.
BMW used to be extremely good and very repairable/upgradeable.
They have clearly lost their way. Seems like a fundamental loss of confidence in their ability to produce leading technology, and instead feeling like they must defensively focus on blocking and extracting maximum funds from customers, both with costly "authorized-only" repairs and subscriptions for heated seats.
Sad
Reminded me of the "shim" discussion about BMW motorcycles and part authenticity from the 1974 classic "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance": http://www.hilarygallo.com/the-zen-shim-question/
This patent came from the design department. Some dude looked at the logo and said, “Huh, we could make a screw from this.” The legal team then took it and made a design patent.
If you guys want, I can message him and ask about the grand conspiracy behind it but you might be disappointed.
Correct bit for screwdriver available on AliExpress 5 minutes after the bolt is available for public.
And that would violate both BMWs Trademark and Patent, which at least in Switzerland could mean having to pay BMW damages and get fined for importing counterfeit goods.
Anyone with a mill could fabricate something to fit that in a short space of time.
good thing that it would be a chinese copy, and thus, not subject to switzerland law. So i wonder if chinese law recognize this patent/trademark for a screw?
Their point is that there's a possibility that Swiss customs fines them and confiscates the "counterfeit."
Fine. But the broader point is that the customer is the product, not the owner of a purchase.
That makes me wonder if customer is the product, who is the owner?
Reminds me of the 2-hole "snake eye" or "pig nose" screw heads you sometimes see in bathrooms or elevators. I have several of the bits for these since they come with every one of those n>20 -piece screwdriver bit sets, but I've never actually had to undo one. I guess that goes for most of the oddball bits those sets come with.
If they really wanted to screw (pun, sorry) with repairability (and at significant cost to themselves), I guess they could start making their own taps and dies for nonstandard threads you can't buy anywhere else. Wouldn't stop them from being unscrewed, though.
I rent cars 300 days a year, for work. Generally I don’t have high expectations.
Right now I’m driving a BMW IX2 and it’s the stupidest fucking car I ever drove.
I had booked a Polestar 2, which Hertz unfortunately didn’t have available. Great car, that one.
This feels like they want to use trademark law to prevent third-party products. You can't legally produce the screws without baiscally copying the BMW logo onto it. I don't know if a similar argument would hold water for the drivers though.
IIRC in Europe at least that doesn't work because now your third party has the defence of necessity. They didn't want to use your protected mark, but it was necessary or else their product wouldn't work, so, the protection doesn't apply.
In the USA, in Sega v. Accolade the judge ruled that you can't use a trademark to block access to your stuff. The context was, the Sega Genesis DRM had a check for the string "SEGA" somewhere in the game's ROM; presumably, Sega reasoned that they could license their trademarked name for this purpose to licensed devs and sue makers of unlicensed cartridges for trademark infringement; and did sue Accolade when they attempted to publish unlicensed games for copyright and trademark infringement. The appeals judge overturned an earlier decision in favor of Sega, citing that trademarks can't be used to block what would otherwise be a fair-use act.
Much of Sega v. Accolade was overruled by the DMCA, which explicitly makes defeating DRM a crime in the general case. But the prohibition against using trademarks to gatekeep people performing legal, nonfraudulent activity probably remains and may be cited in future cases.
On the contrary, they are asking for trademark dilution with this.
This is also why a lot of car bumpers have the make/model/logo impressed into the mold itself
The "screw you" jokes just write themselves.
I wrote one for a test drive but then I forgot the turn signal and got pulled over.
I'd be interested to know how BMW manufactures those screws. The patterns in the metal in the image suggest the entire hole was drilled out? The deepest part has circular marks inside that looks like the marks left by a facing tool on a lathe or similar. Then I guess the two wedges were inserted and the whole screw faced?
Unlike all the other guesses here, I actually do have experience with manufacturing specialty aerospace fasteners similar in size, shape, complexity, and precision as these. These are most assuredly being manufactured on a specialty tool called a “Swissing Lathe”, or Swiss CNC machine, because that is the machine you always use to make parts like this. It is a multi-headed turret mill combined with a lathe that can continuously feed a piece of long bar stock and continually spit out fasteners. They were invented many years ago to produce extremely high precision small screws for watches, and in fact Citizen is one of the main vendors of these tools to this day. Based on my experience I would expect the cycle time for making this part to be 30 seconds or so.
Here’s a good video that eli5’s the difference between a Swiss screw machine and conventional CNC.
https://youtu.be/y3y0tATB0lg?si=pkYDT3BV0-6C-aq5
And here’s a video with a high quality soundtrack that shows how the machine combines automatic lathe cuts, mill cuts, and thread rolling without changing machines, swapping cutters, or re-fixturing the work.
https://youtu.be/MPAK5I1HJAw?si=fnMmjDp6ydYSDbfH
And if you need some specialty fasteners made and have an unlimited budget I can reccomed these folks.
https://centrix-us.com/
The prototypes might be milled and/or produced via additive manufacturing (3D printing.) In production the heads are likely formed via stamping. Here's an old video I remember watching as a kid (Unfortunately quite pixelated) of the Robertson screw being manufactured which has a tapered square profile for the bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Td7GjAMAY7Y (The Acme School of Stuff was awesome for its time and still is.)
CNC Milled and suface brushed. I Think these screws are going to be used in some decorative Panels etc. Would be cost prohibitive to use these all over the Car.
This. It's obviously an interior fastener. Maybe they'll have a cheaper one without the logo for the airbag module or whatever. OEMs have spent untold sums over the year hiding interior trim fasteners using all manner of push and snap fittings. A few low trim vehicles have bucked that trend recently, to much savings of labor and tool/die cost and no apparent ill effect in the mind of consumers. And now everybody is testing the waters.
I don't see any geometry that would be hard for casting or milling, it's slightly more expensive because you can't do it in one go, but you have to lift the toolhead if you mill.
For prototypes, almost certainly with a CNC lathe. For a large scale production, I would expect them to drop forge these...
The head was almost certainly milled out of a blank made on a lathe. Something like this: https://youtube.com/shorts/Yf-twqgWZQ8
Those are end mill marks.
Nearly zero chance of them doing that at production volumes though.
Why not? A properly set up CNC machining center would turn those out by the bucketload. That's precisely the sort of thing that BMW does regularly with exterior details, no reason why they couldn't do it for a batch of bolts.
You don't use CNC for making a billion individual screws. These would have their heads formed by being stamped in a die, just like phillips, robertson, security torx or any other screw heads.
You can make anything on anything. Doesn't make it smart tho.
If this were a production run of a few dozen super high grade aerospace donkey dicks with five shoulders and four pockets, an oil channel, a precisely engineered break point and a 12-step heat treat process I'd say yeah, make it on your Swiss lathe with live tooling or bajillion axis VMC or whatever.
But this looks to be a simple small, probably cosmetic or otherwise low-ish strength stainless or chromed fastener that BMW probably wants a few hundred thousand of. You'll be time, money, labor, frustration, managerial nitpicking, just about everything, ahead to just have the fastener industry and their existing expertise make it for you. The "bespoke" drive, the custom branding, those are all known-knowns to those guys. They'll whip up tooling for their screw machines and fill the same bucket in 1/20th of the time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJvQZko8uiU
Edit: replaced video link with better one. Obviously there's fiddle fucking around they're not showing and they're mix and matching footage of different products but the speed things move once you've got it all set up is broadly accurate. A whole bunch of these steps would be skipped or altered for a stainless fastener.
If it's metric thread you only need to unbolt them once, and then you replace them with TORX.
Every time I see that now to me it will represent stupidity and greedy waste
You will be able to buy a "BMW screwdriver" from China in a couple of weeks. This prevents nothing, it's just annoying and goes to show that BMW is run by dickheads (in case you didn't know yet).
Apple's "pentalobe" screws tell you the same about that company.
Wouldn't circumventing trademark lockouts like this be fair use under "Sega v. Accolade"[1]?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade
BMW: The Ultimate Asshole Machine.. now with more assholery to assholes too!
(Their motorcycles had a better rep until now.)
I suppose that depends on your definition of “now”. BMW has had a 20 year history of fork lower failures on their adventure bikes. Just search “BMW Fork Failure” and you will find a lot of discussion. Here was a Microsoft friend’s wreck in Alaska, which I believe was one of the earliest ones. Front wheel complete separated while she was riding straight and level on a paved road.
https://www.advrider.com/f/threads/crash-in-destruction-bay-...
> Their motorcycles had a better rep until now.
No they didn't. Driveshafts are notoriously bad. It's the kind of failure that leaves you on foot in the middle of nowhere.
Now I’m curious, are there any manufacturers still making repairable cars?
Chinese brands, maybe?
Yet another reason to never own a BMW
[dead]
I think this is misunderstood - everybody points out that how evil BMW is for trying to be proprietary, then immediately points out any Chinese factory can produce a compatible tool for pennies - which one is it?
I think this is a pretty good mechanical design in general because:
- large contact surface (like hex or torx)
- no chance of slide-out (like flathead) or torque-out (like Philips)
- you can use a different size screw bit than the screw, and it wont slide around, or destroy your nut like torx does with hex
> which one is it?
Which what? I honestly don't understand what the comparison is or what is misunderstood as there is nothing to misunderstand - it's a proprietary screw designed to defeat self/unlicensed repair - FULL STOP. Fuck the technical merit. And the point of mentioning that Chinese factories can produce cheap knock-offs is to demonstrate how absurd of a anti-consumer measure this is.
> everybody points out that how evil BMW is for trying to be proprietary, then immediately points out any Chinese factory can produce a compatible tool for pennies - which one is it?
Just because there's a workaround for an unnecessary annoying thing doesn't mean the thing ceases to be unnecessary and annoying.
An I am pointing out the design has merit from a purely mechanical perspective, and is a very poor method for actually preventing third party repair.
BMW has done some despicable things as pointed out by a recent article, like welding in a pyrotechnic fuse that would kill the battery when the car detected a fault, and which could only be replaced by cutting the factory sealed battery case open, or installing 'theft protection' measurers, which could brick ECUs if an unlicensed repair shop would attempt repairs on the car (which have been known to trigger even when the dealership attempted to fix the issue using official tools)
> An I am pointing out the design has merit from a purely mechanical perspective, and is a very poor method for actually preventing third party repair.
It sounds like you are defending both the design and the decision with nothing said about it being a poor method.