Dave A

Apologies if this has been covered elsewhere already, but I could not find it for an E60 when I searched. I wanted to retrofit some LED numberplate lights to my E61, but didn't want to of down the route of buying something off eBay from China etc. I therefore looked about and found a similar DIY for retrofitting the LCi E90 LED's to the pre Lci E90. I figured there couldn't be much difference to fitting them to an E61 so I set about trying it. Here is the lit of parts I bought from BMW - all genuine stuff:

2x 63267193293
4x 61130005197
4x 61130007452
2x 61136925634

I bought these all in Switzerland so I'm not sure about costs in the UK, but should be less than $40 - $50. You also need some shrink wrap, a soldering iron and solder. Here's what they look like.



First thing to do is cut the wires to an appropriate length. It's not important what it is but make them all the same length.



Then solder each green wire to a black wire so you get 4 lengths like this:



Then use the shrink wrap to cover the joins and also to cover the end of the green wire so that it won't short out on the one next to it:



The put two wires together and shrink wrap them together:



Then push the pins on the end of the black wires into the green connector. These click twice as they go in - make suer you push it in far enough. Then close the cap on the green connector:



These green connectors then push into the sockets on the new LED lights:



Then go out to the car. The lights are removed by using a flat screwdriver, placing it into the slot and pushing the whole unit to the right. It;s spring loaded and then you pull it down to remove. Unclip the old light connector, and place your new green pins go into the existing connector on the car.

This is what my car looked like with the original lights:





Here is one of the lights fitted:



And finally with both fitted:





Once these are fitted, you are going to get an error message from the car saying the numberplate lights are out. The best way to deal with this and the only way I would recommend is by using NCS Expert to recode the light module and eliminate the errors. On an E60/E61 this is the LMA or LM2 module, and the lines you need to code are:

KALTUEBERWACHUNG_KZL_L

KALTUEBERWACHUNG_KZL_R

WARMUEBERWACHUNG_KZL_L

WARMUEBERWACHUNG_KZL_R

Set all 4 to nicht_aktiv and that's it - all done!

BesE60

Good job on the install but what difference does it make where the lights are from?