BMW’s new 'roundel' fasteners look great, could be a big problem for bikers

Picture the scene: you’re on a round-the-world adventure. It’s just you, the bike, a foreign land, and a serious mechanical failure for company. As you unfurl your tool roll from your pannier and set it on the floor, you begin to realise that all of your conventional Torx and Allen drive sockets are useless, since BMW has switched over to a new roundel design that apes the brand’s famous logo.

Want to find out how motorcycle brand logos came about, check out this feature.

That could be a very real situation in years to come, as BMW has filed a patent for these very fasteners in just the last few weeks. And while they are undeniably cool looking, they seem almost wholly designed to make working on your bike (or car, for that matter) harder than ever before.

Embossed with the letters ‘BMW’, the business end of the screw features two deeply embossed sections, located where the blue quarters of the roundel are usually found. To undo the fixing, you’ll need to have the matching tool with you, and we are guessing these will come in a range of sizes.

The practical benefits of the design seem hard to grasp. An Allen-headed or Torx screw head has, for many years, been the go-to solution for screw heads that require lots of torque to be transmitted through them. They are compact, easy to produce and universally used for car and motorbike manufacturing. Whether the new BMW design can handle such high torque applications remains to be seen. BMW seems to think so, although with my sceptical hat on, it feels more like a move that could help push more people to main dealership servicing and repairs, and away from doing it themselves, or having a trusted independent mechanic stepping in.

Sure, you could go out and source a complete set of these BMW-branded tools and sockets, although as a private individual, that isn’t going to be cheap. At least not until the market gets flooded with imitations, which could, in some cases, be constructed from lower-quality materials and possibly not to the same tolerances as the official BMW part. 

It is worth noting that the BMW bolts are just at the patent stage and haven’t reached any production vehicle just yet. If they do make it to production, though, you could be screwed out of spannering on your BMW at home.

Talk about a crossed thread!

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