Below are a few photos of the transmission mounted. The beautiful welding is not my work, sadly.

The welded areas have since been painted as well. It looks stock!

The rear subframe has been removed so that reinforcement plates can be installed. This addresses a weak point in the E46 body. If my setup makes anywhere near the torque I'm expecting from it, the reinforcements will be necessary!

I have also taken the plunge and made the most irreversible modification to the car yet. I'm well and truly committed to this now!

The holes I've cut out allow room for part of the rear battery pack. Each of these holes will get a 4kWh block of cells. Then a 8-10kWh pack will lay across the top of them, spanning the width of the car. The rest of the pack will live up front under the hood.

We got the shift linkage connected as well. The stock Lexus linkage arm was modified. The BMW arm was cut to the correct length and mounted roughly 90 degrees from the stock arm. Then the stock arm was cut off. A convenient flat spot on the transmission was used to mount the cable assembly. I can now shift the transmission in to park from the original gear selector inside the car. P engages the parking pawl. Every other position simply engages a switch so that the ECU can detect which gear is selected. There is no mechanical influence inside the transmission in any position aside from park. I got lucky since both the Lexus and the BMW had roughly twice the travel between P and R than they do between R, N, and D. A little bit of adjustment once it was installed was all that was required to make it work.

The arm is shown only tack welded here. It was properly welded once we were sure everything lined up the way it needed to.

I also put my CNC router to work again to cut out the mounting plate for the charge port. It fits so nicely it's almost a shame nobody will ever see it once it's installed.

More updates coming in the next few days!