Headlight Melting Inside

[Dave92N54]

Recently I accompanied a close friend of mine to buy a 2011 E82 135i. This is his first BMW and so I came along, being an E92 335i owner with a lot of knowledge on the cars.

I am however stumped by his car.

Little background, it has an M235i block in it. The previous owner spun a bearing and purchased an M235i block for the forged crank and also installed VAC baffling in the pan.

I ran codes on the car immediately when we checked it out, was clean. Everything worked, headlights, wipers, all the usual checks. Fast forward, we get it home. Next day he tells me the heat isn’t working and he has a cornering light malfunction (clogged heater core, common issue for you guys?) flushed the core and all is good.

On to the cornering light. I came over and opened the headlight cover on the top, and in absolute shock the inside of the headlight was melting (WTF????). I unplugged the cornering light on both headlights as they were both melting and we started sourcing new headlights. He found a good deal on some LCI Adaptive Xenons (car had pre-lci adaptive xenon lights).

We installed them today and everything went well.. sort of. The passenger eyebrow is not lighting up, and I believe this is due to the gauge wire I used to tap the harness for the light. I was using a disassembled E82 harness from the junkyard for pre-pinned wires and so, it only had one angel eye wire, the other I had to use a thicker one. We will be tackling this again with a correct guage wire later.

Now, the real issue is the cornering light and the melting. As far as I know, with my E92 the inner bulb on the lights is the cornering light, and should turn on with the turn signals, reverse, and when making a slow speed turn. I believe this is the same for you guys, correct? His does not seem to be doing this, same with the old headlights. They ONLY come on when the high beams are triggered. They come on when using the quick flash and full time high beams. I believe this is why they melted, likely receiving too much voltage or causing too much heat.

I believe this may be the result of coding, which I can most likely resolve but before I dig into his FRM I wanted to check the correct functionality of the “cornering” lights with you all here first.

[iminhell1]

Yes, that's a coding thing. Same options you have in the E9x chassis, exact same modules.
There is voltage control, when they come on and for how long yadda yadda.

Along with the coding someone could have put a bulb in that wants more wattage, which as we know also increases heat.


Also, wire gauge isn't going to matter. Many of the LCI brows are dead and that's why folks sell the lights. And shit sellers will be like, worked when parked.

[Dave92N54]

Originally Posted by iminhell1

Yes, that's a coding thing. Same options you have in the E9x chassis, exact same modules.
There is voltage control, when they come on and for how long yadda yadda.

Along with the coding someone could have put a bulb in that wants more wattage, which as we know also increases heat.

I figured the lights worked the same.

Odd for this car to have been coded this way honestly. I’ll have to get out NCSExpert then. Bimmercode expert mode might give me what I want but, never had much luck with it.

Luckily the LCIs are BRIGHT and he lives more in the city than I do so, without the high beams for now he’ll be fine.

Small update, the passenger eyebrow works now. Swapping the pin 7 wire to a lower gauge worked as I expected it would, so he’s pretty happy.