DIY - Rear footwell lights retrofit

[Scott ZHP]

Saw this mod on the rear seat heating retrofit thread and decided to take the plunge. My wife's E70 has these and they really help light the back seat. I have a lightly optioned 01, and the connectors were in the harness, under the rear carpet, just needed to fish them out. Looks like I also have the rear seat heater wiring BTW; the plug next to the red pencil in the second pic; theres an identical connector on the other side. No idea what the large flat plug is.

You need to remove the back seat cushion, lift the front edge up and pull it out. Need to unbolt the middle seatbelt and the receptacle - 16mm bolt. Fish the seatbelt through the cushion and remove the cushion.

I've never had the back seat out, here's what 15 years of accumulated crap looks like: about three bucks in change, assorted hair thingys, moldy pretzels, goldfish, gameboy cartridge, legos, etc. Nice.

You need to unclip and remove the two plastic trim pieces covering the sill in order to pull the carpet forward. These are fragile, I broke one of the mounting brackets holding the clips, no big deal, I epoxied it back together. There are 4 plastic clips holding each of these on.

Working on the BACK SIDE of the carpet, I drew an outline onto the foam of the narrowest portion of the light housing and carefully cut a flap in the carpet from the BACK. The heelboard carpet is foam padded and theres a cup molded into it where these fit. I didn't get a good pic of the foam cups, but it will be obvious where these go. Just center your Sharpie outline inside this foam cup and you're good. The lights are flanged, and the opening only needs to be as large as the "box" of the light housing. Test fit the lights a few times before you make the flap any bigger, then carefully trim the flap out. I slit each corner slightly, fished the wiring through the hole, seated the connector and then pushed them in. The housings have holes in them that are much bigger than the mounting studs, so you dont need surgical precision when making the carpet cut. Just don't make the cutout too large.

The lights do not include the plastic flanged nuts, so I had to source those at my local hardware store, two bucks for some 10-24 nylon nuts and washers. There are self-tapping course thread studs welded to the heelboard.

Took a couple of hours; I really like this look.