E30’s RAREST Part!

I’ve always admired conceptual designers like Tobias Wong, Matty Benedetto, and Katerina Kamprani for their ability to come up with Industrial Designs which aren’t necessarily useful. In fact, sometimes these ideas are absurdly, and intentionally not useful. 

Anyone who has known me for any amount of time knows I’m a bit of a jokester, but for some reason I’ve never been great at coming up with ideas for silly product designs. I suppose I’m just an all-function guy. But last summer it finally happened. I had that silly idea! 

Just in case you’re not familiar – “blinker fluid” is an old car gag of mysterious origins, whereby a car enthusiast prankster would attempt to convince an automotive novice that s/he needs blinker fluid. The prompt is generally when one of the turn signal bulbs in the car of the soon-to-be-pranked burned out, or when it’s time for routine maintenance such as an oil change or filling up the washer fluid.

The joke eventually settled into the fabric of the internet from car forums to social media replies. I always thought the gag was missing a crucial element; Where does the blinker fluid actually go? YouTuber ChrisFix went viral a few years ago with a very clever 4/1 video where he demoed adding the blinker fluid directly in to the blinker bulb housing. While it was a well edited piece, I felt it a bit of a conceptual stretch. 

So when I had the idea last summer I knew I had to do it. Yes, the blinker fluid gag is a little overplayed at this point. However, as a hardware guy, I figured I could bring a new twist to an old car joke. First, different manufacturers have different ways of engineering things. So it’s easily conceivable that BMW would have a fluid tank where Ford might add it directly to the unit. Second, With the E30 having that extra space in the engine bay it was a great spot for the tank, and lends an air of “credibility” to the story. And finally, since I don’t naturally come up with ideas like these very often, it was literally a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do something fun & silly – so I couldn’t resist!

Hope you enjoyed this bit! If you have an old BMW – or any car really – that you can’t get parts for anymore, please reach out and maybe we can get you that impossible-to-find part. And heck, if you like what we’re doing and you want to support our startup, but we don’t have a part you need yet, we’ll print you a blinker fluid reservoir!