Just been doing some research and found out that you can use a E39 rear sun shade switch (61318360693) to control the opening and closing of your mirrors. The switch itself has all the electronics built into it to give you a one-touch open and close action. If you look inside the switch you will see that it has a SSR, a logic controller and some FETs - so basically everything you need.

The switch uses a 6 pin plug and I will update this thread once I know what the part number for that plug is.

But it uses only 5 pins in it.

Pin 1 : +ve for LED light in switch
Pin 2 : not used
Pin 3 : mirror motor wire
Pin 4 : +12V
Pin 5 : GND (-ve)
Pin 6 : mirror motor wire

The only thing is finding a place to mount the switch that looks stock. Ofcourse if you wanted to go the whole hog you can always open the switch up, pull out the electronics from it and the wire it to a normal push-to-make switch.

This avoid needing to buy any aftermarket module. However you still need to be a bit creative to figure out how to get the mirrors to open and close with the lock.

Ofcourse you can even use this to retrofit the rear sun shade in the E60 but the parts required to do that are quite expensive.

P.S. : The switch is quite expensive from BMW but there are loads available on ebay, just look for "BMW sun shade switch", various models use similar switches that probably could be used.

 

Will be interesting to see what you come up with on this one. This the one feature I miss the most, my old C class had them folding on lock/unlock + manually with a button. Seems quite a lot of E60's don't have this option, guessing it was quite expensive.

 

You don't ever give this stuff a rest, huh, Bruce? This seems like a great mod - I myself have been wanting to retrofit the power-folding function, but the cost was stopping. With this DIY, I have hope Thanks!

 

Nice, now only someone do it and do an DIY writeup for this.

 

Would definitely be interested in this mod. Looking forward to a DIY writeup.