Passenger Air Bag 'off' Light stays on!

[kennyisdead911]

Hey I was just wondering if anyone else in e70 land has had the problem of a malfunctioning airbag seat sensor? For the past month or so the light has been acting strange.

The largest problem so far is re-creating the issue in front of the BMW techs.

The first time this happened I was <5 min away from the dealership and took it straight there and had a service tech take a quick peek at it for me. His conclusion was that the sensor maybe starting to go bad, so he said that we should schedule a real appt and that they could take care of it.

Since then, (bout a month or so) we have noticed that the sensor has not gotten any better, but actually worse. Now instead of it saying airbag off when a passenger is seated (bad enough), the car now sometimes turns that light off (airbag on) when nobody is sitting in the seat.

Basically I think the sensor is shot and with the recent 200,000 car recall by bmw for this exact issue in other models, I think my car is part of the problem.

So yesterday I took the car back to the dealership to have them look at it and they said they tried 2 different times for ~20 min to recreate the problem but they coudln't.

I am very worried about the safety of myself and my family because we were informed that if the light is EVER on, that means the airbag is always off. You can imagine how dangerous this can be if someone is sitting in the front seat and the airbag fails to deploy.

So basically I just wanted to know if anybody else has been experiencing this type of thing and if so how did you resolve the problem.

Best,
Raj

[StanF18]

According to the memo on the BMW USA site:

"Affected owners may continue to drive their vehicles; however, customers should contact their BMW Center if the air bag warning lamp, and the passenger air bag ''on-off'' lamp are illuminated simultaneously."

Don't know if that removes any of your anxiety, but it looks like both lamps need to be lit to indicate a seat sensor problem. Perhaps the reason it's lighting with a passenger is that your passenger is not exceeding a certain weight threshhold? So far they have not included E70 in the recall....but who knows, this may be more wide-ranging than we think.

[kennyisdead911]

thats what I'm thinking and my 6'2 215 lb body should certainly trigger the sensor to put the airbag on....


what i was told, if the "airbag off" light is illuminated (at any point), the airbag is off. End of story, it doesn't matter if someone is actually in the seat, the car thinks the seat is empty. Now the sensor sometimes even says that there is someone in the seat, when there is really nobody or anything on the seat (ie purse, briefcase, laptop, etc)


thanks for the input