Passenger Occupancy Sensor Bypass

When I bought the car I knew it had the SRS warning light illuminated, I had done some research into it before I bought the car though. It turned out that the most common cause of this light is the passenger occupancy sensor has gone a miss.

This sensor failing appears to be very common place, so much so that repair kits are readily sold on eBay to 'fix' it. These kits don't fix the occupancy sensor, they just bypass it, tricking the on board computer into believing the passenger seat is always occupied. Some might say it's a bodge, but my opinion is that if I am in an accident where the airbags fire, the least of my worries are going to be whether the passenger seat is ruined and how much it's cost me.

I went ahead and bought the kit from eBay, I was aware that you can make your own bypass but the kits on eBay are plug and play as it were, leaving no lasting effect on the car.


The instructions that came with the bypass kit said you could do the repair with the seat in place, but I'm not a contortionist so I decided I'd have the seat out and do it in comfort. I set about removing the seat, which was very easy, just one bolt into the seat belt, two into the rear of the runners, and two nuts on the front of the runners. I tilted the seat back to find this mess, and two 1p coins.


Glad I was having the seat out after all. On the passenger side there are two connectors, on my car they had yellow connector plastics. The connectors come apart really easily, which was a welcome relief, I've had grief with them on my previous car before.




 With the seat removed I could get stuck in with cleaning up the mess. I started off by using some disinfectant carpet cleaner, household stuff the same as what I used in the boot in the previous post - Boot Thoroughly Cleaned.


I dried the area off then finished with some febreze, a vast improvement indeed. Onto the actual reason for having the seat out, fitting the occupancy sensor bypass. This job was real easy, just disconnect the sensor and plug in the bypass, tidying it up by cable tying it in place.




 Bypass fitted it was now time to get the seat back in, just a case of reversing the above. As it was so easy, and due to the state of the passenger side, I decided to have the driver's side seat out as well and give that a good clear out.

Under the driver's seat was less muck but still not ideal, however, there was a nice £1 tip for me.


After both sides were cleaned I set about resetting the fault code on the dash. I managed to borrow a friend's (cheers Rich) SRS code reader/resetter, which saved quite a bit of hassle.


The code reader plugs into the OBD II port under the driver's side IP (instrument panel/dash) lower, near the pedals. When you plug it in and turn the key to position 2, the code reader will display FA, which when selected will show all the fault codes related to the SRS. Mine showed up the code 70, which means there is a fault with the passenger occupancy sensor, as expected. Restarting the code reader, you can now select cA, which is used to clear all codes. After clearing the codes, the light on the dash flashed then went out. It has not reared it's head since, for once a nice simple job.