I think you simply hit someone from [oversea] sales / customer relations who has no idea about licenses or probably software at all and thinks he does the right

I think you simply hit someone from [oversea] sales / customer relations who has no idea about licenses or probably software at all and thinks he does the right thing. I'm pretty sure there is someone at BMW who knows about it (the industry is aware of licensing issues in general) and that there should also be a process installed through which they can fulfill the license requirements. Usually this involves that the actual device manufacturer / software supplier is tasked with providing all the necessary information. Getting the correct contact in large corporations is usually a nightmare - especially for individuals. Some companies in the industry have information about licenses or about ways to retrieve the necessary information on their websites, but I don't know about BMW. Of course that shouldn't be an excuse and they clearly acted wrong on your request. If you are more interested on the technical side and less on the legal side of the request then I think you won't miss much anyway. All of the GPLed software components will be used as much unmodified as possible (will probably be the Kernel, glibc and some open source daemons). And the actual car related parts will not be linked to them and stay closed source.