M54-powered vehicles use a couple of types of drive belt tensioners, either mechanical or hydraulic. They are interchangeable however, the correct hardware must be used when swapping from one to the other.
The hydraulic tensioner is the updated design. If your vehicle is currently equipped with a mechanical tensioner, we do offer a kit to swap to the hydraulic one.
The mechanical tensioner looks like this:
The hydraulic tensioner - and the required hardware to upgrade - looks like this:
If you're interested in finding the correct tensioner for your vehicle, head over to fcpeuro.com and start by entering your vehicle into our vehicle selector.
Once your car is added to the selector, there are a couple of important ways that we advise correct fitment.
The first is the "fitment indicator" shown on the Product Page after selecting a part. This box is below the "add to cart button" and has two states. It will either say " Yes this part fits" or "Part may not fit, click to verify".
Sometimes the green box will be accompanied by extra fitment notes. These notes may be independent of the information gathered by the vehicle selector. IE: VIN-specific options, need to be taken into account when determining overall fitment.