Bumping this for a good recent answer.

The wife fell asleep on a roadtrip and woke up to a hole in the seat and a hole in her nice Northface jacket. I'm curious as to how this isn't a safety(recall) issue with BMW. The pure plastic Northface shell could have caused bodily harm if it was hotter

Because the heater has an on/off switch. Too hot, turn it off.

Was the wife the usual occupant of that seat? Does she slide across the bolster, the usual cause of failure?

I had mine replaced out of warranty cause I physically had a burn Mark on my leg from zapping of electricity through leather. It even scorche'd the leather.

After reading this thread I have instructed my wife not to pull her usual sit on her feet, kneel on the seat to attend the child (unless 100% necessary), etc gymnastics as I would like to keep both the heater... and the occupancy sensor working.

We've always had non-heated sports seats and it's never been an issue (she's tiny) but this thread has scared the crap out of me with air bag mat damages and heater failures.

Anyone else? It's getting cold here in Calgary (well kinda) and I have a work truck so I can take my time to remove my drivers seat in the X and take it apart, but it seems like everyone says it's impossible to replace the heating element. I don't care to fix the tiny hole in my leather, I just want my heated set to work again...

BMW heated seat elements are stitched into the leather from the factory

The replacement part for most models is an element that can be sandwiched between the original (bad) element and the leather

BMW doesn't offer something like that for the E53, just the leather with integrated element (big $$$), but you can get something in the aftermarket. IPD, the volvo place, used to (?) sell heated seat mats that could be retrofitted into anything, same principle of sandwiching the element between the leather and base material

Wow, decided to jump on the site again and ran across this thread which I previously posted on. Well it ends up I never installed that new seat cover that cost me over $500 - in fact it is sitting in my basement, still in the original plastic, never having been installed. It is black Montana leather (pleather?) for a 2001, non-sport seat, with the heating element sewn into it. I did pull that seat out and take a look at how difficult it would be to replace it - main thing is taking off and putting back on all of the metal (hog) rings that secure the seat cover to the frame, but it looks like it could be done. Even if you decided you couldn't do it yourself, if you took the seat to an upholstery shop with the cover, I couldn't imagine they would charge you much to install it.

Anyway, I will be posting this up for sale soon, I guess after I pay for another premium membership - any reasonable offers will be considered.

Anyone know if BMW will still replace this? I just joined the club... :(

Luckily I caught it fast enough while i felt my jeans getting really hot, the smell of burning leather. No hole present but a slight brown spot in the leather now on my creme beige seats.

Never have fixed my wife's x5 doing this. The other x5's don't have the problem yet.

I have one hot spot on my driver seat. The insulation/padding is thin and hard from age and I can feel the resistive element right under the leather.

I plan to make a small hole and inject the likes of silicone between the heat tape and the leather to push it farther from my skin.

If the problem is a high resistance spot, usually the rest of the element won't be very hot but actually that could just make the one spot even hotter depending where the temp sensor Is.

Plan B would be to install a jumper across the hot spot. That will turn it into a cold spot but I'm not sure how clean of a fix that can be done without tearing off the whole seat cover.

I have an old seat I have from when I swapped seat bottoms that I can use for practice.

As luck would have it for the forum, the wife just got me a new coat that lets more of the seat heat through so now this problem has jumped up in the priority list and you guys are likely to see an AWR-fix very soon


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