Central locking only locks right side.
 

Hey guys. New to me 04 x5 3.0i. When I’m in the car and I press the central locking button, only the right back passenger and front right passenger doors will lock. The ones on the left side both front and back do not. I tried the trick where you unplug and plug the drivers door controls but no luck. Any suggestions? Thanks guys.

Once they are manually locked, do they unlock?

Lock and unlock functions are separate motors - if only one operation fails, it's probably a bad motor. If both lock and unlock fail together, it's probably either wiring or the driver's door module.

I went out and tried it. The locks do not work either way. So if it’s wiring what do you suggest? And if it’s the drivers door module, is that the one with all controls for the windows? Thanks

It has been a while since I was "in there" with my driver's DLA, but I recall @AndrewWynn fixing his and concluding that one motor is for locking+unlocking, and the second motor is for double locking. I don't know what is right here, but maybe think about it some more.

The one general point I'll relay from having a few random, unrelated issues with the central locking system over the years on my 2001, is that it can be pretty amazing how a failure in one part of the system can cause symptoms in a very different place. So yes, if you're thinking that an issue with the driver's door window control module might be causing problems with the passenger side DLAs, I'd say in general, yes, consider that might be true.

My Foxwell was pretty useful in being able to manually command lock/unlock on the doors (left front, right front, both rear), although when doing that, it found weakness in the rear DLA actuation, which turned out to be due to an issue in the driver's DLA. Black magic, I tell ya. :rofl:

Do you know how Andrew fixed his? I will search the forum now. If it’s like chasing a rabbit hold I can live with manually locking it.

Here's the thread of my driver's DLA repair:
https://xoutpost.com/bmw-sav-forums/...or-repair.html

From memory, Andrew later did it a little differently and did more investigation about what the motors do. For my case, I clearly had one motor working great, and the other one not. I did not worry about what it was actually doing, other than to fix that motor so it worked, and moved in the right direction when voltage was applied. I'm kind of lazy like that sometimes.

But in your case, you have two different actuators not working, presumably with those faults appearing at the same time. Given the complexity of the central locking system, I'd expect it unlikely that you have two motor failures in two DLAs appearing at the same time, when a single failure anywhere (LOL, not quite) else in the central locking system could explain the DLA behavior.

When I did the Foxwell tests I mentioned above, I was convinced I had failing rear DLAs as well as whatever else was preventing my central locking from working. But sure enough, once I fixed that one problem (electrical problem in the driver's DLA), the rear DLA actuators were firing at full strength, and still are.

BTW, possibly confusing history with my driver's DLA:
- motor problem. Fixed in the thread linked above. Still all good there.
- a fellow member on here had liked my writeup of the DLA fix and mailed me his old broken one just in case I ever needed it. Not working, but not sure why not.
- at some point after that, the plastic bracket on the DLA that the inner door pull cable connects to started to crack, making the inner door pull not work.
- So I did a quick mechanical tune-up of the gifted DLA, installed it rather than fixing the plastic bracket. Noticed the central locking was not working, but did not clue in ...
- Later (after finding myself locked out of my car when the door key cylinder broke) when I realized the central locking was not working, debugged it all the way to finding there must be some electrical failure in the gifted DLA causing all these problems. Confirmed this by plugging in my original DLA without fully installing it - that made all the electonic magic work again.
- So I did a mechanical repair using a steel bracket, epoxy, and screws to the cracking plastic bracket on my original DLA. Still rolling with that one.