I've had an intermittant airbag light on my '08 'vert since not long after purchase. She's been to the dealer in 2008 and 2009 -- the techs never found the problem (not clear how hard they looked -- I don't believe the seat had ever been removed).

2010 goes by with no airbag light. A month or so out of warranty, the light sporatically returns This time, I finally started to see a sometimes-correlation between the light and where I rested my tail on the seat cushion -- not always, but enough to convince me that it was an issue in the seat wiring.

To make an already too long story short(er), after pulling the seat and chasing every wire, I found a broken wire hidden under unblemished insulation, right next to the yellow connector for the side airbag.

It appears the wire was pressed hard against the back edge of the connector, cutting the wire but leaving the broken ends close enough together to intermittantly connect. When I was probing with an ohmmeter with the terminal out of the connector, when I pushed the terminal toward the wire, a connection would be made. I cut the terminal off, salvaged it, soldered it back to the wire, and reassembled the connector.

Thought I'd pass along the data point, as I saw a bunch of the seat-related airbag light issues in the archives.

 

Thanks for the info! Tell me, do you regularly move the seat fore and aft or do you leave it in one place all the time?

 

Yep -- I & spouse use the EZ enter/exit feature.

I'm guessing that the first time it was used, the connector was in the wrong place from the factory installation, and the wire was smashed/broken.

 

Mine goes on and off and finally stayed solid. After The Vette Docs scanned it with a Tech-2, it came back with "Drivers' Side Seatbelt Tensioner" needs replacing. Anybody order on of these? Apparently it is the part of the seatbelt that recives the buckle. Though after they cleared the light, it hasn't come on after a few driving sessions........

 

Interesting...Thanks!

 

Hi Spencer

I wanted full power seats with adjustable lumbar supports and side bolsters in my DSOM Z06 - so I put in a pair of seats out of a wrecked base C6 that had the high trim level (heat, side airbags, etc.).

The seat belt pretensioners had fired in the accident (I assume along with the front airbags), so in addition to putting on my Z06 seat skins, I had to put the pretensioners from my Z06 seats on the C6 seats.

Take a look at the ones below - the one on the right was activated in the accident and you can see that the plastic sheath has been collapsed when the charge fired and pulled the cable tight to cinch down the seat belt:




I'm sure yours hasn't been activated, but you can see the yellow connector that can tend to get sqaushed under the seat and give intermittent airbag light problems like you're experiencing.

In a car that has side airbags, that pretensioner connector clips together with the side airbag connector (they kind of stack together) then they plug into the yellow connector from the car's wiring harness.

The connector from the wiring harness, the side airbag connector, or the seat belt pretensioner connector can get squashed and broken by movement of the seat - and that's probably what causes most intermittent airbag lights.

Bob

 

Thanks so much Bob! I'm sure that is my problem. Today the light kept going on and off intermittently while I was driving so it sounds like my clip is squashed or maybe frayed just to the point where it is about to fail.......What does a pre-tensioner cost anyway???

 

I would think they should be free, under warranty. Bad engineering on GM's part, IMO.

 

Thanks for the information.

Brent
GM Customer Service

 

Following my finding/repairing the broken wire in the seat airbag harness, I reinstalled the seat and fired her up -- and found the airbag dash light now always on.

I removed the seat and double-checked the work I had done -- solder joint ok, shorting spring in the right location, harness correctly routed under the seat. So, I reassembled and drove up to the dealer about a mile from the house and asked for a quick read of the error codes.

The reported problem is no communication with the SIR system (i.e., something unrelated to my repair work). I had a good conversation with one of the senior techs, and decided to leave the car with him to hunt down the issue (possibilities include modules, wiring harness carrying the data signals, etc, and I have neither the time nor the access to diagnostic equipment to further pursue the source). He's not in Monday, but will look at it Tuesday.

How do I know he'll look at it Tuesday? Because it is now sitting in his bay -- ironically (or perhaps directly related), when I got into the car to put the top up to leave it, the top wouldn't go up!!

Talk about icing on the cake -- it's never done that before. So, the car was put in John's bay to await his arrival.

At this point, I'm waiting to hear what John finds. The car is out of warranty (expired Oct. 2010), but this problem was not fixed when I had the car in for the issue in 2008 and in 2009. I will be very interested to see Chevrolet's response to out-of-warranty coverage for an issue which was apparently present since new (the first visit in 2008 was within a month or so of our Museum delivery). There's another issue with the Nav radio occassionally not reading the map DVD, but I never got around to reporting that before the warranty expired, so I expect that one will be on me.

I am a couple days away from deciding whether to move to a similarly-equipped 2011 Grand Sport 'vert -- options and pricing defined, and even a car locally identified (or we'll do R8C again if I don't want to live without F55, which the local car does not have) -- everything short of final negotiations and loan approval. Obviously, I'm not planning on making a final decision until I see how the new GM will respond to the current situation.

More to come!

 

I had disconnected my battery to change my steering wheel, when I put it all together my top would not go up. I indexed my windows and then in worked.

 

Of course!! Thanks very much for the reminder.

 

Said I'd post a final update:

The senior tech that had done the initial diagnosis work ultimately concluded that despite the fact he could see no flaw in the side airbag or seat belt pre-tensioner connectors under the seat (including no issue with my broken wire repair), he needed to replace the connectors. Apparently that worked, as the instrument cluster airbag light is out.

He saved the connector for me. I've disassembled all three connector bodies, and removed all eight male/female terminals, and I can't spot a flaw anywhere -- good contact/tension between each terminal pair, and no obvious broken wires. I may strip the insulation of the ends of the terminals' wires to see whether I find another hidden broken wire -- not that that's necessary I suppose, but the engineer in me can't stand to not have a reason *why* a problem occurred (so I know that the fix was the "right" fix). At any rate, I drove the car yesterday and today with the light always out.

George was spot-on about the re-indexing -- thanks! Guess I was in too much of a rush to hand the car over to be thinking clearly.

Last thing, I was *very* pleased with how I was treated at Jim McKay Chevrolet -- the service writer didn't just blow me off because I had tried to figure out/fix the issue in the first place, and they were very good about the cost of the work (they knocked off a substantial chunk of the bill in view of the past history). Funny thing is, I would have been happy to pay the full ticket, because I felt I got my money's worth -- they really listened to try to glean something useful from what I was telling them, and they seemed to really want to take up the challenge (intermittant faults are the worst!) and make it right.

And as icing on the cake, my local Corvette club just shifted to McKay dealer as their sponsor