Ford in the EU is a european car manufacturer with around 100 years of history, so yeah, I think the answer will be the same as for BMW. And sure, car makers have special status - they have just recently secured a huge win in reducing the scope of emmission-related fines, which will now be charged from 10g/km instead of 0g/km from 2035. But this too applies to every manufacturer.
I understand the legislation is different, but the anti-consumer sentiment is the same, but worse in this case since I have a feeling the screw bit won't be nearly as available and cheap as Lightning cables are.
> Ford in the EU is a european car manufacturer
An American company with factories in the EU. I don't think it's the same as a company headquartered in the EU.
Factories in the EU means workers employed and taxes paid in the EU. It means a lot here.
But you don't? The other end of any Lightning connector is USB-A or USB-C. Works just fine anywhere.
> Factories in the EU means workers employed and taxes paid in the EU. It means a lot here.
So I guess going back to the original parent's point: if your company is producing stuff in Europe, proprietary screws are just fine from a consumer point of view. Which kind of confirms everyone's suspicions about EU regulations... they're just foreign company shakedowns under the guise of "protecting the consumer."
Zero evidence was provided to support this, but I guess facts don't matter anymore.
What do you think the whole thread was about?
Apple makes a proprietary connector: anti-consumer behavior according to the EU. Use a standard connector or get fined to oblivion.
BMW makes a proprietary, patented _screw_: perfectly acceptable according to the EU.
Are you being intentionally obtuse here or what? The proof is that you have an instance of the same behavior in two different domains, with the main difference being one company is American and one is European.
This was not reactive behavior to Apple on the part of the EU, the legislation was agreed long time ago and there was a period until which all manufacturers had to adapt. Zero evidence.
> BMW makes a proprietary, patented _screw_: perfectly acceptable according to the EU.
Car (parts) market is a different one, different rules apply. Additionally it was not proven there will be no aftermarket availability of the parts. There is no proof, I am sorry.
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.
This isn't that different to how other bit sockets are made, but instead of loading the bit in torsion, it will be subject to bending forces to loosen the bolt. This will make it far weaker than other tools. So good luck loosening these once they have a few years of corrosion on them. Plus, with the head design, they'll be far harder to drill out to get a bolt extractor on. Although 3d printing and scanning don't really help that much here.
A CNC mill should also be capable of creating an usable driver bit, or in a pinch, drill out 1mm center of an ordinary + bit.
Original Source (per the HN Guidelines):
https://carbuzz.com/bmw-roundel-logo-screw-patent/
(Also has the drawings of the screws from the patents.)
Or is the purpose less to prevent people from removing the screw and more tamper evidence?
Even in that case, with a photo or impression of the screw head, an unauthorized key/bit could be produced with with 3D printing (JLC3DP offers it cheap) or EDM.
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.
Welcome to the Dystopian world.
It looks like lots of people choose to lease very expensive cars, and give them back after 3 years for a new one, dropping a obsolescence time-bomb onto the second-hand market and providing a strong signal to manufacturers that there is a substantial maintainability-insensitive market segment.
I am still surprised that no manufacturer has a balls-out "buy our cars, they will NEVER DIE, anyone can service them, and your kids will still be driving them" model, as they might have lower returns from not gouging over subscriptions, planned obsolescence and parts and software lock-in shenanigans, but they'd instantly capture a market segment.
Our love of blinken-lights will be our downfall.
That, coupled with massive consumer preference for “zero maintenance” vehicles like supposedly not having to change transmission fluid for 100k miles. The manufacturers know that such a schedule will guarantee (more) damage, but it’s considered a marketing expense to handle early failures under warranty but sell the idea your car just needs an oil change every 10k miles and nothing else. After that first owner and warranty period the parts are simply considered a consumable.
If you plan on keeping your car for more than 3-5 years, toss the maintenance schedule handbook in the trash and figure out what an actual reasonable schedule is. It’s probably at minimum double the recommendations are.
For my car it’s been message boards with enthusiasts and mechanics who work on my vehicle. Luckily (or not…) mine is a somewhat niche performance car so people tend to nerd out over them.
A lot of it though is ignoring the vendor recommendations for outsourced parts like transmissions - go direct to manufacture and see what they say. This does seem to involve having an “insider” with manuals intended for service techs.
I also imagine fleet vehicle schedules might be informative as well.
Unfortunately I don’t have a very clean direct answer on it - it was a lot of feeling around and when in doubt erring on the side of over maintaining vs under.
Some is simply basic common sense though. We have not developed lubricants that can last over a decade and 120,000 miles in temperature ranges from below zero to hundreds of degrees.
And ironically, the reason why Japan invested so heavily in high quality was to overcome their former image of low quality products that severely hampered their ability to sell to international markets.
I am not a libertarian that holds a religious belief on the infallibility of the market, but a lot of times, the market gave us better outcomes than any regulation.
And in regards of screws: If you have too many laypeople doing stupid shit for critical components, you might also think 'lets fix that by adding a barrier'.
This should be illegal. You're supposed to do what, stay on the roadside for 20h before an authorized repairman can reach you? What if the weather is harsh, and you run out of basic supplies like food or your medicine?
the real reason is that if a manufacturer makes their car same as those repairable, easily maintainable old cars, they will soon lose customers (as they stop needing to buy new ones!).
Planned obsolescence out-competes in a market economy that does not have regulation against it, esp. in a saturated market (like the US). The gov't could legislate, but then businesses cry foul - not mention that these manufacturers hang the sword of damocles over the gov't in the form of job losses (but of course, out-sourcing is OK...)
If VW had been trying to make the mk3 engines bad for planned obsolescence, then why did the mk4 engines like the ALH TDI and the 1.8T earn reputations as some of the best engines made? VW had quality issues in the 90s that they later attacked and fixed, but it was just sloppy leadership and engineering, not a plan.
What engine exactly are you seeing broken cams on? My guess would be this is not VWs fault but a mechanic failing to keep track of the ordering and orientation of the cam bearing caps and swapping them around- they’re line bored and any modern engine will break the cam if you do this. I’ve seen it on a mk2 GTI.
While I agree that some models improved when it comes to performance (especially in the 1.8 - 2.0 Turbo range as that's the sweet spot when it comes to cc) and technical failures, I would still say that all newer models have more problems with software. So much that it's really not even necessary to create these problems even in regards to regulatory requirements or safety compliance.
Just thinking about the messy code that I've seen to pass ASIL-D requirements makes my skin boil.
I mentioned the ALH TDI from the MKIV Golf/Jetta only, which is a legendary engine, with a ton of them having now reliably reached half a million miles with no major work required. This long predates the dieselgate cars, and adblue was never used on the 4 cylinder VW diesels anyways.
As an aside, yes dieselgate was intentionally criminal, but was sort of the opposite of a quality issue. VW couldn't figure out how to get their engines to work reliability and drive well with current technology at the time and still meet emissions requirements, so they cheated. They had to fix them (I own one) and they are still good, but not as good as they were before the fix- worse fuel economy, less reliable, excessive adblue consumption (in 6cyl models). The ethical thing to do would have been to pull all of the diesels from the market instead, which is what many of their competitors did at the time. Passenger car diesels in the USA are effectively dead because the emissions requirements render them less practical than gasoline cars.
VW had serious quality issues in the 90s that weren't strategic, but were actually causing their company to lose its reputation and nearly collapse. They turned it completely around when Ferdinand Piëch started running things- they were arguably making the highest quality cars at in the world any price point during his tenure as CEO. The quality of current VWs has now fallen back down again, even lower than the 90s cars unfortunately.
My mechanic told me that engine was really poorly suited to city driving, which was a lot of my activity, and short trips caused an inordinate amount of carbon buildup, which he cited as the cause of my cold weather performance issues. Anyway, I think it’s probably a great car for folks with a lengthier commute. I learned my habits and routines were likely murder to a TDI engine, but especially those dieselgate models.
Wow, talk about an oversimplification. The Mk3 moved from an 8-valve to a 16-valve engine; yes, this adds more valvetrain failure modes but also brings myriad other benefits, increased power, better fuel economy, reduced emissions…
The idea that a carmaker would purposely engineer flaws into core engine components in order to drive future sales doesn’t make much sense.
There is a legend that Mercedes 190D was built like a tank and this caused customers to not buy the next iteration. Mercedes solved this, making cars a bit unreliable.
You need to realize modern business revolves not around one-and-done, but around recurring revenue streams. To the "business minded" the only thing that doesn't make sense is leaving money on the table.
Wanna start a car company?
Ironically, things are like that in a big part because of legislative and regulatory intervention.
> 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.
A lot of such things are just workarounds to reduce weight and meet tightening emission standards.
Every thing that can be built with less metal, thinner walls, lighter metals will be built like that when every gram matters.
Tighter tolerances, increased pressures, increased temperatures, higher rotational speeds. All of this leads to increased efficiency, but sometimes (not always) the trade-off will be decreased reliability.
I know someone who had an issue with his old WV Kombi, and thought it would be the last drive (Around 2020-2021). He found an auto shop who could manufacture pieces and replaced every single malfunctioning pieces from plans they got directly from WV.
OK, now I remember - it was this comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38496499
... which I was very intrigued by and I tried to contact you via your web based email submission on cookie.engineer but it broke/failed.
Would you please elaborate[1]:
- who was the person who ran crimeflare, etc.
- Where can I learn about the lawsuit(s) that made them suspend this reporting/indexing ?
I am (potentially) interested in resurrecting these efforts but would like to have a better understanding of them first.
[1] email info@rsync.net if you don't want to respond publicly.
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.
Thats why the BMW logo is in fact necessary
Having locked down products also allow the manufacturer and dealer to form a agreement of sharing some of the post-sale revenue. The dealer can have their own shops for repair which the customer are now forced to use, naturally at a steep markup, and the manufacturer get a slice for every repair. The cheaper sticker price can then be decreased further since the dealer now have an additional revenue after sale. The customer can go to an other manufacturer approved shop, but then how many of those exists in the same city, and the manufacturer can artificial limit how many shops get approved in the same location.
The story is the same across any number of industries right now. Customer choice is not a argument for the manufacturer to not do it. If you as the customer want to opt out, the only choice after a while will be to not buy a car or buy the expensive ones for double the cost.
If you crash into a BMW, you'll still have to pay for the now-inflated cost of the repair - most likely through the mandatory liability insurance. Insurance premiums have gone through the roof, to a big part not just due to insurance company greed but because cars and repairs to them became more expensive.
Which a huge scam, because there's no way that an average €10 Euro widget has a 30% tariff on it, and I'm pretty sure that very many things things are 0%.
If you mess with the logo, the console locks up during boot. If you don't, you're violating the trademark.
Meaning the users. And your neighborhood mechanic.
Actually, for making devices I wanted to own and operate, BMW actually has been Apple, and Apple has never been an Apple up with which I will put. But when I test drove new BMWs 3 or 4 years ago, they weren't Apples any more. So I bought a Porsche Apple.
this feature I like in a car is being able to feel the road and the inertia of the car through handling the steering wheel. Too much power-steering or suspension isolation (or something) and it feels like you're driving a marshmallow. Apple computers have similar qualities on many dimensions actually. "hey look, you can cook a marshmallow on a stick and you can even eat it off the stick, let's make the UX be one stick!" "just one stick?" "yes, just ̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶b̶u̶t̶t̶o̶n̶ ̶m̶o̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶m̶e̶n̶u̶ ̶b̶a̶r̶ one stick!"... "hey look, Steve Narcisstick, you can even poke the mouse the one stick!" "no, I spell my name Narcissdick")
The new models don't work well for me. And things like the original adaptive suspension that the 6 and 7 series had (e.g. active antirollbars, true variable steering ratio and rear wheel steering) have been downgraded in newer models.
Their EVs also aren't that good. They're trying to catch up instead of leading innovation, while still at a high price point.
It does work but so does advertising which is why the mass which is actually relevant here, will not react. They don't care about the screws. They don't even care about the extra cost for specials. They'll go out there and advertise the fact that they can afford a BMW with ALL features and so it spreads on...
We're also not even talking only about the private customer. It's business cars who are even more relevant.
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-...
Sistem 51.
Once you're out of warranty you're done.
Meanwhile my dad's 40 year old Swiss automatic has been serviced just 2 times, and the last time was 10 years ago when the integrated bracelet broke.
He had fashioned a strap for the watch using a piece of rubber when the bracelet broke and was perfectly happy with that unsightly arrangement.
Luckily for him, the market for watches is big and when he finally needs something new he has a lot to choose from. The watches on the low end are better than ever and the watches on the high end are excellent but crazy expensive.
I won't pay for 5g (phone does that) or Serius XM (for all the channels, I'm really not jazzed about the offerings)...but $10 for the above features seems reasonable.
By the same token, all ranges of Mini Cooper now have the B48 turbo 4...the top of the list had a bigger turbo and improved intake...the bottom two I suspect are identical with differing software.
I will happily take advantage of that when the car's out of warranty. (I have the base motor)
I haven't used CarPlay since I'm an Android user, but this reeks to me of a manufacturer developing a problem so they could seek rent for the solution.
If there were no financial incentive otherwise, they certainly would have ensured the CarPlay experience was as nice as their own solution as a selling perk.
I'm not a fan of subscriptions, but in this case, the $10 seemed like good value for features. the map is better, and it's much better integrated into the HUD.
It felt like you were getting more, unlike having buttons that don't work unless you pay...weird psycholgical difference between a subscription and being held hostage.
Want to press that phone button to make a call? Sorry please visit your VW dealership.
Want to have CarPlay or Android Auto? Sorry please visit your VW dealership.
Want to speak to your car to make a call? Sorry please visit your VW dealership.
I also have a 1972 VW Beetle which doesn't require any intervention from anyone else on Earth to use. Guess which is the classic between these 2 models?
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.
Western manufacturers: increasing lock-in to preserve revenues of middlemen
https://www.carscoops.com/2025/09/chart-with-chinese-car-bra...
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.
georgefrowny•1mo ago
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.
HPsquared•1mo ago
gessha•1mo ago
georgefrowny•1mo ago
I'm not even opposed to the mod-cons, it's just the irreparability, lock-in, touchscreen-centrism and planned obsolescence they basically all shoehorned into their new platforms.
psd1•1mo ago
https://www.slate.auto/
M95D•1mo ago