Headlight Retrofit - PreLCI Halogen to PreLCI Xenon
 

Hi all,

I'm looking to upgrade my stock Halogen lights for my 2005 525i, the lights are showing age and the wiring insulation is starting to rot away, im guessing from the heat...as its all cracked.

So I see here on the forum and a lot of other places after searching a lot of discussions about Pre LCI to Xenon LCI conversions etc etc.. but Im unable to find information about going from PreLCI Halogen to PreLCI Xenon.

I found that BMW sells a retrofit kit.
Retrofit kit bi-xenon headlight BMW 5' E60, 525i (M54)

Is this really all I would need to have PreLCI Xenon on the car? Im looking for a plug and play option or at least as close to that as possible since I have no wish to mess with that beyond parts swapping. Does this also involve coding?

The other route I was thinking of going is PreLCI Halogen to LCI Halogen and then work with aftermarket HID kit since the LCI Halogens have projectors.

Any thoughts or guidence is appreciated.

A lot more to it, at least pre-LCI Halogen has a missing ground wire on each of the headlight plug which is use by the Xenon ballast and also adding auto leveling sensor.

After that you'll need to get coding done since the car was born w/o Xenon the control check will fail and you'll get various warning i.e. pre-LCI halogen uses 2 AE bulbs on each headlight while pre-LCI Xenon only 1 bulb the bulb discrepancy will trigger iDrive error.

Unfortunately going to LCI ... the process is more than just simply swapping (which is the easiest part) ... the plug is different between pre-LCI & LCI (no matter if it's Halogen or Bi-Xenon) so you have to buy the retrofit cable kit then cut off each old pin and re-crimp new socket and use new plug and reprogram and also may need the rear LCI taillight. Also due to the model year you may need newer LCM (Computer module that handle all the lighting).

I did all kind of light conversions and couple years ago I went full conversion pre-LCI halogen -> LCI Bi-Xenon ... not an easy project ... you can also hack do various wiring hack mod w/ pre-LCI Xenon headlight to trick the computer to avoid re-programming so the car still think you have halogen headlight.

Another option is going with modded headlight kit that you can buy from various vendor that has been re-work as the headlight still look similar just using aftermarket projector etc and that way you may be able to do a simple swap.

GL!

Thanks for your input. Greatly appreciated!

Here's the important question, where are you located?

Maybe someone can do the work for you locally if you can't do it yourself.

I'd imagine that unless an independent shop is very well versed with these cars, they wouldn't be able to do it properly either. I recently saw a thread on M5board where a guy was having his shop convert pre-LCI to LCI, and they didn't even know LM2 was required or how to code the car. It made me chuckle a little.

Yeah my options are very limited. I'm in Panama (Central America) so it does complicate things a bit.
There are independent shops here just as anywhere else but as far as their knowledge is on this.. I don't have that trust.

If I were to lean to do a complete upgrade to LCI Xenon is there a complete write up with the details on how to do this so someone who is more inclined to working on these sort of things could follow thru provided I get all the parts? I've searched around but so far I dont see a standardized process in doing the conversion.