The tail light failure is well known design flaw that many of us have delt with. I "fixed" mine with the solder fix but they still play up from time to time. I looked into the fix that uses the MB lamp holders but it's stupid money here (for all four tail lamps) so I'm going to mod my tails and wire the lamps in with a custom mod.

Be aware that the pre-facelift and facelift tails are different and the mod shown above by andrewwyn might not work on the later facelift cars. In fact it could damage the LCM, which lights up the tails progressively using PWM, depending on the need. Tails only is four dim lamps, normal braking adds brightness to two of the four and sudden braking lights all four brightly (and brighter). Or so I believe - I can't actually get behind the car to see!!

The PWM signal results in each single filament 21W tail lamp getting an average of about 5v as a tail, 9v as normal brake and the full 12v during sudden braking. Clever... But a shame about the connection design....

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Wayne
2005 BMW X5 3.0d (b 02/05)
2001 BMW F650GS Dakar (b 06/01)