Four problems related to wiring have been reported for the 2004 BMW 545. The most recently reported issues are listed below.
Electrical wiring in headlights are disintegrating. The shielding is dry rotting and flaking off nearly every wire in both headlights causing them to malfunction during driving. Lights will cut off randomly. I'd imagine the wires are shorting out.
Bare wires inside the headlight housing, these are hid lights made by hella for BMW they are oem. When contacting Bmwna they say that's not how they make there lights and blame heat and the car not being maintained at a BMW dealership, well the rest of the wiring on the car is just fine even the wires that come in contact with a high heat producing engine. . . It's the same exact issue Mercedes Benz had on the w202 chassis, wires that would degrade at an extremely fast rate. But for headlights that cost well over $1000 each. But my question is what happens when a family is out at night and there headlights malfunction because of something BMW knows about but refuse to take responsibility and said family has a wreck and kills multiple people because of a known problem. This is my second attempt at getting something done the first was contacting Bmwna which equaled to insulting someone's knowledge of electrical components. Also the headlights no longer adjust, the angel eyes no longer work bulbs blow as soon as they are replaced and constant warnings that parking lights have a malfunction. Telling someone heat is the cause makes an automotive company kinda look ignorant especially when wires touching an engine are not effected by heat at all and are still 100% flexible and have not lost any of the insulation. You can see some of the wires have liquid electrical tape used, should any vehicle with 119xxx miles have such an issue?.
Passenger side headlight assembly wire "jacket" is brittle and flaking off, causing malfunctions in parking lamp "halo" due to exposed copper wires. Also, high-beam halogen light wiring has exposed copper wiring. Wires get hot to the touch and cause a "passenger parking lamp malfunction" to appear inside the car. Problem seems like it is a fire hazard to say the least. Many online forum members have expressed the same issue. I attempted to contact both the headlight assembly manufacturer, hella, as well as the car manufacturer, BMW of north America; both companies did not take responsibility. Problem expands over many models for several years. Please investigate. I have even heard of headlamps catching fire, causing substantial damage to the vehicle. Even if the consumer decided to purchase a new headlight assembly for ~$1,500, the wiring will likely still cause the same issue a few years down the road. The headlamp bulbs are high voltage xenon gas bulbs that have over 20k volts feeding them. This is a huge safety issue!.
Custom ordered 545i in 2004 as still original/existing owner. Have had repeated electrical errors on I drive "dynamic drive failure proceed with caution as the steering has been effected and see your BMW authorized rep," "electrical failure see your BMW authorized rep. Immediately proceed with caution, "passenger restraint fault proceed with caution effecting belt and belt force limiter, stalling at very low and as high rates of speed as high as 70 mph without any warning. " sometimes the car logs the errors and many times it doesn't fully that it takes BMW na's computer to access the extended ram in the car to retrieve per BMW na that the dealerships can't. I even have pictures of the errors the car doesn't log so they claim they can't do anything. BMW engineers in germany have been involved as the car refused to reprogam twice for the dealership. This car is compliant w/all recalls per the dealer and has been in the shop over 16 times w/only 70k miles. The dealer and BMW na can't determine the root cause of the problems except to say they think they're being triggered by low voltage and its had 3 batteries at less than 70k miles, isn't driven much, and BMW na nor the dealership can permantently resolve the errors and stalling and/or stop them. BMW na and the dealership have replaced the entire wiring harness at 13k miles, have refused to take the car back after several attempts after qualifying as a lemon under the lemon law since before 10k miles amd been given multiple excuses for all of the errors they can't resolve. They keep telling us to bring it back every time, buy an extended warranty at $6k to continually service electrical and stalling/running rough issues they can't fix under original factory warranty. They're not reporting service trips to carfax and refuse to release documentation on the car regarding the problems to us or our attorneys.