Funny...I'll repost this here....
This is one of the arms that is physically on my personal car. I now have about 15K miles on these and will be going on two years pretty soon. List of mods are in my sig.
I can also say without a doubt this is common. We sell fuel system upgrades and we have bought a lot of BMW LPFP assemblies. We used to order them in two different ways. OE and OEM...but after a while of ordering OE and finding it to be a complete waste of money, we stopped. Given we no longer sell complete Stage 1 kits with an OE pump, there was no reason to continue paying the extra fee for something that was going to get disassembled and rebuilt anyway. However this is what we saw when we ordered both types.
1. BMW OE replacement. This is a VDO assembly that comes with a part number molded in to the top hat, a sticker, and a little blue stamp on it. Oh and the box had an extra sticker on it with the BMW part number.
2. VDO BMW OEM replacement. This is a VDO assembly that comes with a part molded in to the top hat (but ground off), a sticker, and a little blue stamp on it.
The difference in this case is that we have the ability to bench test them (there is no performance difference) and we also completely disassemble them. Again, there is absolutely no difference.
The funny thing is that the OEM was cheaper but actually costs them more because they have to go in and grind off the part number.
The other funny thing...one time we ordered quite a few pumps and they apparently didn't have enough of the OEM pumps...so they removed the OE pumps from the boxes and sent those as OEM...
...score! OE pumps for the OEM price that didn't have the numbers etched out.
All that said, I'm not trying to talk anybody into or out of anything...just provide factual information based on our experiences.
