The E60 life cycle impulse introduced some pretty significant lighting upgrades to the Bangle era 5 series. I recently retrofitted LCI tail lights on this E60 M5.
You would think adding newer style lights to your car would be an easy process. Unplug the old ones, plug in the new ones, and voilà, right? Nope. The LCI light retrofit requires a whole new light control module. Starting with the E60 era nearly every module is programmed to a specific vin and coding varies significantly for different vehicle options. The solution to this problem was to find a used LM2 (light module) from an LCI E60 and recode it to match this M5. I got lucky and found one in a self serve junkyard from a 2008 535i that still had the tail lights.
The lights bolt right up, but an adapter harness is necessary plug them in. These harnesses have 2 extremely long wires that pin into the light module plug under the dash. Not too bad of a job, it is easy to wire under the back seat and along the door sill trim to the dashboard.
Coding
Since this car was keeping the pre-LCI headlights, the coding was trickier. After comparing the coding configuration of the LM2 when set up for pre LCI lights as well as LCI lights, I merged them together and kept all the coding data for the older headlights and newer tail lights. At this point the lights worked, but the LM2 still showed the donor car’s VIN. This was easily fixed through one command with Tool32, and the retrofit was complete.
The LM2 has an extra bonus feature: angel eyes as DRLs. This even works with the old pre-LCI headlights, and helps the car look so much more modern.
