[poorcollegekid]

Alright, I have been battling a faulty driver's side low beam halogen H7 headlight in my 2006 325i sedan for months now. I have tried replacing the bulb but that isn't the issue. I have also checked all of the fuses associated with the headlights and they are good too. When I inspect the internal wiring to the headlight that plugs in to the back of the headlight bulb, I can see the insulation has frayed and cracked a bit. I tried individually wrapping those wires (at least the portion that I can reach) with electrical tape, which seemed to solve my problem for a few months but no longer. The yellow warning signal in the car accompanies the headlight being out, so part of me thinks its the car's software stopping the headlight from coming on, but maybe that's a good thing. It's still happening intermittently, where some times I'll get in and the lights fire up fine, but 90% of the time it will not. I've also had intermittent outages of the passenger side tiny white auxiliary bulb within the headlight. In all my research I've narrowed the culprit down to a few options:

1. The wiring interior to the headlight is bad. It shorts or something and when the car starts it cuts power to the headlight for that reason. I need to take it in and get it replaced because I'm not too interested in taking off the front bumper by myself (unless someone tells me it isn't that tough... I'm fairly mechanically savvy but don't have much tooling, especially tooling for BMWs). Could frayed wiring internal to the headlight be causing the response I see from the electrical system?

2. The footwell module is bad. It has received 50 "headlight out" signals and has given up. I read somewhere that you can't reset this guy, you just have to replace. Makes perfect sense. Thanks a lot BMW. I don't think this is the likely culprit since the light has come back on rare occasions.

3. The headlight control module is bad. Do halogen headlights even have headlight control modules?

4. It's something else that I haven't thought of or found on this forum or anywhere else in my hours of research.

I'm frustrated to no end on this one. Usually I can track down issues like this and fix them on my own. I'm a bit at a loss here. Any help or insight or ideas are greatly appreciated! Cheers!

[Scotty89]

If you can visually see the wire insulation is compromised, it sounds like you've got some wires shorting out somewhere - but then that would usually blow fuses.

Do you have a multimeter and a wiring diagram (i.e. Bentley Manual)?

If not, may be easiest to take it to an auto-electrician. I don't expect it would cost a lot to fix, but then if you haven't modified the headlights, I'm surprised it would kill itself.