Bypassing Occupancy/Airbag sensor on a D2

[Singh]

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.



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!