dom-E34
01-30-2007, 07:32 AM
I bought my E34 518i about six months ago, and everything was working perfectly up untill about two months ago. the first thing to start malfunctioning was the alarm, the car would not stay locked over night, i would lock it in the evening and when i would come out of the house the next day the car would be unlocked. this soon progressed into the car continiously locking and unlocking as i drove around. i checked all the fuses and fusible links and all was as it should be. so i removed the after market alarm system in the hope that it would solve my problems, but it didnt. while removing the alarm i found that water had leaked into the car and gathered under the ECU's underthe back seat, i also found an unused connector under the back seat that had become corroded by water damage, so i imediately cut off the connector and taped up and bagged the wires to avoid shorting. i also found that the boot actuator was not connected to the locking mechanism so i got the part needed and connected them, i also checked all of the wires going from the car into the boot and they were all perfectly intact. For a while i just put up with the irratic locking until one day the power locking on the drivers door stopped working completely it could be opened using the key but to unlock the rest of the doors i had to run around to the passengers door and unlock that (which was not fun at the height of and irish winter) the next occurance was that the power locking went out completely thus deadlocking the back doors, i managed to un-deadlock the doors by opening the drivers door and keep it open while i climbed into the back and pulling out the General Module (ECU in control of locking,windows and wipers) and putting it back in. A while later all power locking went completely and with it went my electric windows but atleast now i can lock and unlock the doors manually. at the moment i dont mind not being able to open the windows to much (at its freezing and miserable out most days).
None the less i decided to bring the car to a bmw dealers so they could run diagnostics on it in the hope of pinpointing the cause of my problems. 320 Euro later (which is about $414.612 dollars) the said that they weren't really any closer to solving my problem and that it would take hours more of testing (at 50 Euro an hour) just to be sure i wasnt my Relay or General modules that were faulty. or they said i could just buy a new general module at a price of 300 Euro or get a second hand one and see if that solve my problem. Thats when they hit me with the fact that bmw changed the E34 modules in september 1991 and so i had to get one out of a car newer than 1991. which proved near to impossible, but eventually i found a breaker practically at the other end of the country that had one. So i bought it off him brought it home plugged it in and ....Nothing, not even the slightest difference, all i learned from it was not to bring the car back to the dealers coz they were going to bankrupt me. so now im all out of ideas, the car runs beautifully and the body is immaculate so i dont want to have to get rid of it. So im hoping someone out there might be able to help or even have some ideas on what my problem could be or even how to go about finding the cause of all this misery!
None the less i decided to bring the car to a bmw dealers so they could run diagnostics on it in the hope of pinpointing the cause of my problems. 320 Euro later (which is about $414.612 dollars) the said that they weren't really any closer to solving my problem and that it would take hours more of testing (at 50 Euro an hour) just to be sure i wasnt my Relay or General modules that were faulty. or they said i could just buy a new general module at a price of 300 Euro or get a second hand one and see if that solve my problem. Thats when they hit me with the fact that bmw changed the E34 modules in september 1991 and so i had to get one out of a car newer than 1991. which proved near to impossible, but eventually i found a breaker practically at the other end of the country that had one. So i bought it off him brought it home plugged it in and ....Nothing, not even the slightest difference, all i learned from it was not to bring the car back to the dealers coz they were going to bankrupt me. so now im all out of ideas, the car runs beautifully and the body is immaculate so i dont want to have to get rid of it. So im hoping someone out there might be able to help or even have some ideas on what my problem could be or even how to go about finding the cause of all this misery!