Mods & Fixits

The first step in any car I have purchased is to install and hardwire my Valentine One radar detector.

Just $35 and a couple of hours to add a universal garage door opener to the Z4

Excessive noise from the front of the S54 engine indicated to the dealer that I had the dreaded situation of loose VANOS cam bolts. Luckily, the repair was done before any permanent damage to the engine and my extended warranty covered almost everything. Whew!

When one of my daytime running lights burned out, it was time to try and find an LED replacement for the dinky factory halogen

More LED retrofits, this time I upgraded the M Roadster's license plate lights with a kit from LeatherZ

One of the most useful mods that I have done was to add a smartTop Controller to my Z4. Normally you have to hold the console or key fob buttons down for the full duration of opening or closing the convertible top. This is a PIA when all you want to do is quickly raise or lower the top and start driving. The smartTop Controller adds customizable one-touch operation to the top, very nice! The full programming manual can be found here.

Trunk illumination in the Z4 is pretty measly with a single small light tucked all the way on the right side. Put a couple of items in the trunk and the light is completely blocked, making a flashlight sometimes necessary. I got this idea from several on the ZPost Forum to improve the situation by adding a long LED strip to the top rim of the trunk.

This project is to swap out the Z4M's stock shift knob with that from the M5. The reason is shorter quicker throws and smoothing out some of the notchier shifts. Nice side benefits are that the M5 knob just looks cool and is better illuminated at night.

By November 2016 the high beams on the Z4 had been acting increasingly wonky to the point that it was hard to trust driving at night. They'd flip on at random times, not go off, not go on. Sometimes the dashboard indicator would light up, sometimes not. Really crazy.