So, I got the 'BMW' airbag pressure mat bypass unit through the post last week and thought I'd investigate a little....
Here it is, not particularly pretty but functional. Comes with a 2 pole electrical conector at one end for connecting to your car harness...
Oops, now I've invalidated my warranty....
Might as well have a peek inside the magic box of tricks now....
Oh, so its just like a huge blob of glue.....
Before we risk breaking it, check what the actual resisitance is:
...and now, de-glue it to see what we have....
Er, 2 resisitors, one diode and a very minimilistic bit of board.... !!
But, would it work on an A8 ???
This is the view looking from the passenger footwell at the underneath of the seat. We're interested in pins 2 and 3 of the big brown connector, which are the blue and white wires. These are the occupancy sensor connection that goes straight back to the airbag controller.....
Its far easier to work on if you remove all the connectors, then the loom will pull out to the front of the seat to work with. Here, I have located and snipped the blue and white wire, and removed the insulation to make the high quality connection with the electric block connector...
And voila, box connected. The colour of wires on the bypass box (aka 59p's worth of parts from Maplins) bare no resemblence to anything, its just a trial and error to which way round works...
So, does it fool the airbag controller?
Yup, it sure does.... Once you've reset the warning with Vagcom or similar, its happy that the occupancy sensor mat is working with range.
However, if you read the measuring blocks in Vagcom, it clearly thinks that the passenger seat is unoccupied, which has the knock on implication that in a collision, the passenger airbags wouldn't deploy.
I wouldnt be fitting this particular box as a 'solution' to the problem as I generally value the lives of folks I call passengers, but as soon as I get chance to measure the correct resistance across an 'occupied' sensor mat then all we have to do is create that resistance instead, and probably make a far neater job, and make a far better connection to the car
P.S. If anyone has absolutely no mates at all, and wants a slightly out-of-warranty bypass box cheap PM me
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