Can someone guide me? I just bought headlight and taillight assemblies for my 2000 S430 but I am utterly unsure as to how I should install them. Does anyone know how to take existing assemblies out and replace them with the new ones? Any help or assistance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

 

rear ones....open the panel to access then there are 5, 8mm screws. that is straight forward, dont forget the screws on the quater panel for the side of the lights. the fronts are pretty easy too but lossening of the bumper might be nessasary to remove them. there is a torx screw that hold the bumper and fender together. you must remove the wheel well liner to access.

 

Thank you for your advice. I will be attempting to tackle this project tommorow eve and hopefully I wont run into many complex challenges.
I do have another question though, and this has to do with the airmatic suspension system. I only drive the S430 on saturdays while going to dinner, or on sunday afternoon/evenings while taking my wife out. One fine sunday, I went to the garage to get in the car and tried to start the car and the airmatic suspension error showed up on the instrument panel. It said that the car was too low to drive. I called my mechanic "Richard" and explained to him as to what was going on and he came over that afternoon to check on the car and stated that most probably the suspension pump had gone bad. I had done some reading that day in the forum and asked him about the relay going bad and he said that he had moved relays around and nothing happened so it was most probably either the pump or the shocks. Anyways I ended up purchasing a new pump and relay and etc. When heinstalled the pump, the car still would not go up so he moved the relays around and finally the car went up. It made me wonder if it was the pump that was bad, or was it merely the relay. Richard, by the way, is a hard working mechanic and I can call him to do service on my car even at home if I need to, but his knowledge is not that vast. What I mean is that, he normally recommends replacing the whole system if there is one factor of the system not working as he normally cant tell which factor of the system is misbehaving.

To make the whole story short, the S430 is functioning fine now except that the car lowers itself on its own since it only gets driven once or twice a week. It does raise itself backup once I put the key in the ignition, is that normal for the car to do (lower itself when not used and raise itself once its running or the key is in the ignition). Please advise

 

you need to inspect the top of the strut towers under the hood. they probably have cracks in them and need to be repaired. you can test by putting some water on the top of the struts when the car is low. and then start it up and see if you get bubbles from the top of the struts. i can send you some pics of the strut top so you can see if they have already been fixed than you have a different problem.

 

Thanks.. A Pic will be great to have to check on the struts.

By the way, Richard and I installed the headlights and tail ligts, the combo looks great except that we lost one of the nuts that go on the left tail light's side panel. Also we ran into small challenges with the installation of the headlights, but by having two people trying to install the headlights we were actually able to install them without taking the bumper off (hurray!!). After installation we checked to make sure that all components of front and tail lights were working properly, which appeared to be the case. This was until I took the car for a test drive, well within few minutes I got the error (check R fog lamp)...then few minutes later I got the second error (check L low beam light)..So needless to say both lights started to work only partially. Any reccommendations on what could be the problem and how to alleviate it?

Also, I drove the car a bit over the weekend (daytime only since the headlights dont work) and this morning when I was taking the car to the office I noticed that the car was raising itself up again {previously i thought that it only raised itself when driven rarely (once or twice a week)}