Quote:
Originally Posted by jeffmiller
2006 X5 3.0 6MT
Airbag light came on, local indy shop identified it as a broken passenger seat sensor. recommended I pickup a bypass to get the airbags working again.
Purchased the bypass (which included the seatbelt sensor) from Airbag360.com. (2006 models had slightly different sensors than earlier X5s, which I learned the hard way).
installed both sensor bypass units and ended up with a dead battery the next day (Airbag light did turn off though). Jumped it and continued to have dead batteries for the following week. Had battery/alternator checked out at auto zone. Both a-ok. I removed the sensors since it's the only thing I've recently changed. Battery problems immediately stopped.
Waited a month, no battery problems, so tried installing the sensors again. Again within 24 hours the battery was dead. And continued to die for the following week.
JUST TO BE SURE, I repeated the removal/ reinstall process for a third time. Same results.
Contact to Airbag360 has not gotten anywhere. ("I'll ask technician...")
Anybody have any thoughts? My next move is to have BMW fix the seat sensor, which I hear is $1k! (also my car does NOT qualify for the seat sensor recall - it's build date is 60 days too late. Grrr.)
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I have a 2006 X5 3.0i Automatic Transmission...I went trough this process I think 2 years ago.
The first module i bought, didn't drain the battery...but it made the car behave like it had electrical gremlins. For example, sometimes when we came back to our car after parking it, the hazard light were flashing without any reason. Other times right after getting out of the car, we weren't able to lock the car with the remote for about 10 minutes. The most annoying and frequent bug was: KEY IN IGNITION message when we shut down the car and opened the door, even if we had removed the key obviously....
I think i looked for the culprit for about half a year before I finally tried to unplug the seat emulator when the KEY IN IGNITION message was ringing. TADAAAA - the message disappeared immediately.
I then bought another (different type) seatmat emulator. It worked - as did the first - but 2 days later: Drained battery!
This time I was aware that the seat mat emulator could play bad jokes... again I removed it just to find out: No more battery drain.
The reason for all this is probably a lack of comunication between the seat mat emulator and the other devices of the car. Even if it makes the Airbag light disappear, it seems it seems that it's comunication is not 100% what the car asks for.
The latest X5's (as yours and mine) have had some newer type of seatmat installed.... By now and with the experience gained (as you said: the hard way) I don't think it is covered by any module available out there.
In the end i ended up using BMW Scanner to code out the OC3 system. I don't like this solution... because I can not be 100% sure what's behind this "one click" coding and if the Airbag still works. I've planned to use NCDS Expert to read how the car coding has been modified.
What I can tell you is that after disabling the OC3 system in BMW Scanner, also the Seatbelt warnings / display is disabled. Still the Airbag lights comes on for a few seconds when turning on the car (as it should), to do it's operativity self test. Same for the passenger seat airbag light on the roof.