Was going to post in the “What did you do for your X5…” section about my R and R of the ignition switch this am, which went great, to a point. The only odd thing was the new switch wasn’t quite clocked correctly when I broke it out of the box. So I turned it another quarter turn, approximately, with a screw driver to match the position of the old switch, and installed it with no problems. The car starts and drives fine, no codes, etc. I’m not sure if it will fix my random SES light and other occasional gremlins and codes that pop up, but the switch was 20 years old so it couldn’t hurt.

My euphoria of another BMW job well done was quickly shattered by the alarm going off approximately 1 min after I locked it. I repeated this several times…unlock, lock, alarm goes off after a min or so. No codes and everything is showing closed, locked, powered, immobilized, etc. I pulled the hood switch pug and it still goes off.

Could I have gotten the wrong switch from FCP, or installed it wrong? It’s a super simple job tho. Thoughts would be appreciated. In the meantime I’ve pulled the alarm fuse (13 in glove box) and it runs, locks, etc. fine. I need to go to work in a few and the car will be at the airport for several days so hopefully there won’t be any parasitic drain of some sort.

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Current
Original owner 2002 E53 X5 4.4i to 4.6i swap
2026 G80 M3 6 spd
2025 G06 X5 50e
Former
1972 Audi Fox
1986 Saab 900S
1996 BMW Z3
1998 BMW E36 M3 Sedan
2004 BMW E46 M3
2006 Audi A3 Quatro
1993 Mopar 318 Jeep Grand Cherokee
2015 V6 Jeep Grand Cherokee