The driver side bi-xenon would not fire, although angle eyes light up fine (in parking lights/DLR mode). i ruled out the D1S bulb problem by swapping the sides. Dash throws adaptive lights and low beam errors. Right unit however functions as normal in all modes.
when asked for low/high beams the left side halo rings light up but start blinking and winding noises are coming from inside the unit (seems close to the driver/control modules, but not sure - kind of old printer noise). interestingly when i unplug the left lightbulb in low beam mode the angel eyes are stable (=no blinking). I checked the connections, fuses, OBD errors and nothing came up.
SOLVED:
I drove the car quite hard with DLR only and after a while tried to switch on the low beams - and voila - miraculously both xenons fired, no more errors, auto levelling works as well. i was so happy i made a few extra circles around the neighborhood!
yesterday i tried reconnecting the bulbs, checked the plugs connections once more, sprayed some WD...maybe it was that fact that the battery got charged a bit more while driving? must be something with the intermittent current/connections...but it still beats me why and what.
Dunno if this model is affected...but we have had f10's and f11's 2010 to 2014 suffer from software issues in headlamp modules. BMW are doing a free "quality enhancement" on them...a recall ius what other manufacturers call it.
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"If you don't know how it works...dont try to fix it."