Bypassing Occupancy/Airbag sensor on a D2
 

My brother in law (Ranj) did this for me and wanted to do a write up, so here it is from him, it would be handy for anyone wanting to put in 95.96 seats into a 97+ car or to sort out the famous recaro seat airbag occupancy sensor fault.

It is possible to code out the rear seat sensors but still need to bypass the front seat occupancy sensors to get rid of the airbag light. To do this I had to replace the sensor with a load to make the airbag module think that a sensor was present.

So I connected a resistor (100 ohms) to the the blue and white wires from the block connector shown below, this is the one that comes out of the carpet and connects into the seat.

http://forum.a8parts.co.uk/attachmen...1&d=1272147968

To bypass the airbag sensor use a 5.0 ohm resistor and connect it to the two wires in the orange connector coming out from under the carpet.

It is similar process to bypass the rear seatbelt sensors. The the 95,96 seatbelts don't have sensors whereas the 97+ do. Cut the yellow connector of the green wire and connect a 5 ohm resistor between the two wires. The green wire is just under the parcelshelf and is connected to the original seatbelts.

It is possible to code out the rear seat airbag sensors using VAG COM, however my initial attempts to do so flagged up some incorrect codes from the airbag module (yet to try Ian's suggested code!) You could use resistors again to bypass these sensors. Make sure you don't apply a current to the wires connected to the airbags in the seats!

Now I have no airbag lights, success! +++

Thanks for that Amar,
Mine's a '98 and I've just had to replace the rear (sports) bench following a rather stupid 'accident' with it. The replacement bench didn't have the occupancy sensors in.
However, a local vehicle upholsterer's has recovered my seat base with the undamaged leather from the replacement at quite a reasonable price, hopefully the 'bum sensors' will still work when I collect it tomorrow morning, if not - thanks for the post mate


Richard.

Only the occupancy sensors are in the base. The airbags are in the upright rear seats.

If you are transfering the cloth across to the base with seat sensors then you shouldnt have a problem.

Otherwise if the sensor is damage then all you have to do is connect a 100 ohm resistor across the black connector with the blue and white wire.

You can pick up the resistor from maplins.

In my case, I just cut the sensors out of the old base and chopped it in to the new base.

Ranj

I refitted the rear bench today, all went according to plan. I still had the airbag warning on the dash, as I'd not disconnected the battery in my rush to remove the seat.....
Managed to reset the warning light with my first attempt at using VAGCOM, but it showed a gearbox problem, not that I've noticed anything wrong with the way it drives. So I guess its time to save up.

Thanks for the info, a valuable post indeed..

Edit...... Aaah, I panicked, didn't step on brake pedal before activating VagCom (from stateside Audiworld forum).... no need to save now :-)

Thanks for that write up Amar, its on my todo list.

No problem, my brother in law did it. The A8 is his car and he's gonna be doing some crazy mileage in it for work!

The rear (and front for the matter) occupancy sensors are bonded to the foam rubber. The leather/alcantara/cloth/whatever covering you have fits over this and is a 10 minute job to seperate by just undoing the clips underneath. There is no good reason why it shouldnt all work perfectly when done, and I wouldnt expect to pay much for the 20 minute job of moving the cow trim over !

Do you know if that resistance has the seat 'occupied' or not ?

I did some tests with a 'BMW' airbag resistor off Ebay, and the most concerning thing was that once fitted, the car just assumed always that there was no passenger sat in the front seat, so they would never get the benefit of an airbag.

Personally, if I'm going to crash my car, and I've got the misfortune to do it with someone I'm bothered about in the passenger seat, I'd hate to think they suffered any injuries because I saved a few quid bypassing a safety device....

Its good work Amar and will get it through the MOT, but I wouldnt ever do it personally unless I knew the resistance was set to make it think someone was always sat in the seat, and not the other way round.....

Just food for thought...

Thanks for bringing that to my attention Ian, I'm really not sure. My brother in law did everything so will get him to look at the thread! +++

Airbag light sorted, Big Thanks to Amar and Ranj
 

Hi All, This is my first post not sure how to do this, I am not good with computers, but here goes. I have had the airbag light on for around a year, its driving me nuts. So after reading Amars write-up on it, I thought I give it a to give it a go, My car is a 51plate S8, and vagcom was telling me its G128 passenger seat occupancy sensor faulty, So I followed Amars instructions and fitted a 100 ohm resistor across the blue and the white wires, which on my car made no difference, So i ran 2 wires up to the centre console to try other resistors to them,
So off to Maplins I went and bought a 1K ohm pot, and connected that to the 2wires on the centre console,Also I connected vagcom up to show Airbag measuring blocks, and I discovered that the 100R was giving me a reading "too low", adjusting the pot I could change the reading from "too low" to occupied to "too high", I adjusted the pot to read occupied, then erased any stored airbag fault codes, I didnt bother measuring what resistances caused the reading to change as its not important,I have achieved what I wanted, which is the airbag light to switch off.

I would like to say a BIG Thanks to Amar and Ranj for all their help in sorting this out for all the the people with this airbag light fault on their cars.