[Solaire]

Hello fellow 5'ers.

I'm in a temporary situation as a proud owner of two F10's at the same time, and am trying to find out how feasible it is to DIY remove the ambient light option from my older 2012 pre facelift car onto the 2014 post-face lift car.

Both cars have the same interior colour scheme, including the wooden trim panels. I've read up on previous posts with one poster having installed a kit from scratch, but it seemed like a lot of work that involves making holes in places *yikers*.

I'm pretty handy, worked on a lot of cars, but don't want to open a can of worms, especially on a BMW... and I'd obviously want to sell my older car sooner than later so won't have the luxury of being able to mess around with it for ages.

Any tips, thoughts, ideas? I'd consider a speciallist too - if anyone has recommendations around East London then I'm all ears.

Cheers

[Solaire]

TLDR: Not easily possible, wiring not easy to extract from the loom and key components are quite well fixed to the door card. Going to fix an aftermarket kit instead (will do another tgread)

Had a crack at this weekend, started with the back doors. Removing the internal door handle trim and long pointy panel trim was easy enough, as was popping the door card off. Get a trim removal tool, plastic in the shape of a wide crowbar is all you need. T30 for screws holding in the door card.

You'll find 3 new modules with an LED light each; one for each of the trim pieces (long bar trim, door open handle, bottom cubby hole). These appear to be snapped into place. Each have a clipped on wire to power them and herein lies the problem. They're all very quickly intwined to the main door wiring loom that is loosely wrapped with fabric tape, that disappears into the door, rather than terminating in an easy to extract place.

Also the fibre optic thing for the long bar trim is quite well fixed onto the door card so not easy to pop off. Another option is potentially to swap the entire door cards but my front seats have more controls on the doors on the newer car so no go.

Instead I'll be buying an aftermarket kit off eBay and installing that instead.

Hope that's helpful, am on a phone on the way to work so will upload photos later.