During my commute from Ct. to NJ this AM in somewhat heavy fog, I noticed a lot of E60s driving without there headlights on. Dangerous considering others can't see you well, even though it was daylight but very foggy.
Now usually E60 drivers are pretty much with it, when it struck me I was doing the same thing. I do have daytime running lights, but that does not help you in the rear, since your tail-lights do not go on with the DRLs. Most of the E60s I saw did not even have DRLs on. The answer of course is we are letting our cars do all the thinking for us. The auto headlight position and sensor we have come to rely on DOES NOT react to foggy conditions. They sense it is daylight, so fog or no fog, off they go and you become just another jerk driving dangerously in these conditions with your lights off. The same goes for any other late model cars with auto sensing headlights.
Thus we have a safty feature acting in reverse for many of us, creating a DANGEROUS situation.
In short when visability drops for any reason, switch your lights on manually (all the way to the right) so they go on, and more importantly, STAY ON in both front and rear. It could prevent an accident.
A shame to bang-up these beautiful E60s!
Netjazz

 

Good advice -- you can either that or you could just drive with your fog lights on all the time...

 

Hehe I dont even use the auto head light feature. I still manually turn on my headlights when it gets dark. When its dusk or dawn I use the angel eyes... I dont like the Auto it never turns on when I want and never turns off when I want.

BUT when I do turn on the headlights I turn it onto the Automatic position so I can benefit from the Adaptive feature. Basically I treat the Automatic positon as the manual ON position.

 

You have given me the opportunity to once more demonstrate my ignorance of my own car. What adaptive feature do we have? And, how do you use the angel eyes apparently by themselves? Are the angel eyes on all the time?

 

You have given me the opportunity to once more demonstrate my ignorance of my own car. What adaptive feature do we have? And, how do you use the angel eyes apparently by themselves? Are the angel eyes on all the time?
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Joking right? hehe I was talking about the adaptive headlights... the headlights turn with the wheel that way it'll illuminate the road ahead of you even when you are turning in a curve. That only works in Automatic mode. (* Switch one click to the left *) It wont work when you manually turn the lights on by turing the switch all the way to the right.

http://www.bmwworld.com/technology/lighting.htm

and assuming you do not have daytime running lights you can turn the Angel Eyes on by turning on the parking lamps (* one click to the right*). That way only the nice 4 round rings show up and looks nice and mean from ahead... will scare the people ahead of you away.

 

Hey Eric..... I don't know what CIP version you have but when I upgraded to 19.02 it fixed the problem with the turning on/turning off of the lights at the wrong time. Now the lights don't turn on in bright daylight like they used to and they turn off within a couple of seconds when going from a dark area into daylight (like when exiting a tunnel/underpass)........they don't just stay on for no reason. I don't know whether the dealer did any other sensitivity adjustments on top of the software upgrade or not.

 

Yesterday was very foggy here too (NY). When In doubt, i go ahead and use the 'fog lights'

 

..i never use the auto headlights sorry all, i just think that auto headlights are the most rediculous feature ever...when we've become so lazy that we cannot even be bothered with turning the headlights on and off, we've totally lost it, imho

 

Thanks. For some reason, I was thinking that our 545i headlights do the adaptive trick. Did adaptive headlights come on all the 545i's? I though maybe the trick with the angle eyes is have the running lights activated--which I don't.

 

Don't know what the US manual states but in the UK the manual clearly mentions the inability of auto headlights to react to fog.