There are 1 stored owner reports matching the lighting leading-label group for the 2021 BMW X5 in our NHTSA-sourced dataset. These are unverified consumer reports and may not reflect confirmed defects.
This group counts stored reports whose component label starts with one of this site's matching prefixes, ignoring case. Each matching report counts once within the group. Components mentioned later in the label or only in the narrative are not searched. How component counts work
Loaded 1 of 1 matching reports.
Open the full vehicle complaint log (all categories)The low beam headlights do not illuminate the road sufficiently when there are dips in the road or going up hill. The dealer says the lights are fine but relative to the other cars, there is clearly a problem with low beams on undulating roads. On undulating roads or going up hills, the low beams often only illuminate about 20 ft in front of the car. The problem appears to be BMW has drastically limited the upward lighting from the lights for safety of other drivers. However, they have gone too far and created a safety issue with too little upward illumination to be safe on uneven roads. The low beams are great on a perfectly flat surface, but even with a small up hill grade, the low beams are not set to provide enough lighting of the road. I have taken to driving with high beams on for undulating roads because of the lighting provided by the low beams is so bad. This means inadvertently blinding oncoming drivers because I don't turn the high beam headlights down soon enough. I often need to use high beams to read the names of side street signs. The turn signal does a better job illuminating these side street signs than the low beams. By trying to enhance safety for on coming drivers from low beams, they forgot to account for real world driving condition of undulating roads and have created a worse safety issue by forcing more frequent use of high beams that absolutely blind on coming divers.
Complaints are unverified consumer reports submitted to NHTSA. A high complaint count may reflect vehicle popularity, not defect severity. Data sourced from NHTSA public records.
NHTSA source checks for this vehicle year
Checks are recorded separately for each dataset, not for the whole page. Dates use UTC. A missing check date does not mean no records exist.
Vehicle import recorded: Apr 28, 2026. This is the stored import date, not confirmation that every source was successfully refreshed.