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.
Have they actually used it anywhere or just have the patent? Because I expect they won’t actually use it anywhere, like with Sony’s (IIRC) patent where you have to shout “McDonald’s!” after watching an ad. Though I wouldn’t be too surprised if they actually use it
That’s what’s often missing from stories about patents: big companies churn out patents in case they ever need to use them in patent warfare against competitors. For the sole reason that the competitors are doing the same thing.
However, I doubt it that BMW would ever have a chance to use this particular patent on a competitor.
Most of these employera pay employees a couple thousand dollar bonus for any patw t they get out there successfully, with zero limitations on actually implementing the patent.