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Purpose and Design
The chargepipe is the pipe that feeds "charged" condensed cold air from the intercooler directly into the throttle body. The stock N55 chargepipe is brittle and plastic. There are many instances of it blowing on a stock tune and especially with a stage 1 or 2 tune. I upgraded it with a fully aluminum counterpart bought from VRSF in a few simple steps.
Stock chargepipe
This picture was grabbed from the internet as I no longer have the stock chargepipe installed, but it is regardless the same engine. As you can see it has a very flimsy plastic design. The pipe the person is pointing to is the chargepipe, connecting directly to the throttle body in gray coming from the intercooler off screen.
Aftermarket VRSF Chargepipe
This is the aftermarket VRSF Aluminum chargepipe installed on the X5. Its install involved taking the clasp off the throttle body(second picture) to release the chargepipe from that connection. Then, you must pull it out of the intercooler's outlet socket seen at the bottom(first picture). The newer chargepipe comes with brand new clamps and a rubber socket to align over the chargepipe and the intercooler outlet. This is to provide added rigidity at higher PSI through the pipe. I also had to remove some O2 sensors seen on the top side of the pipe, and another MAF(mass air flow) sensor underneath the pipe which was quite a challenging reach.
