B0061: Passenger Seat Belt Tension Sensor
What to do
The passenger airbag may stay switched off even with an adult in the seat, and the airbag warning light will be on. The car is being cautious rather than broken — but the passenger is unprotected in the meantime, so have it looked at rather than ignoring the lamp. Do not attempt this yourself; it is part of the airbag system.
What this code means
The passenger seat belt tension sensor circuit is faulty.
A seat belt tension sensor exists to answer one question: is that a person in the seat, or a child seat strapped down hard?
The car decides whether to enable the passenger airbag from the weight on the seat. A forward-facing child seat with a child in it can weigh about the same as a small adult — and an airbag deploying into a child seat is dangerous rather than protective, which is the whole reason the passenger airbag can be switched off at all.
Tension is what distinguishes them. A person sits on the seat and the belt lies slack across them. A child seat is cinched down tight, deliberately, so the belt is under continuous high tension in a way it never is around an occupant. Reading that tension alongside the weight lets the module tell one from the other.
So a fault here does not disable an airbag loop — it removes the car's ability to classify who is in the seat. The usual response is to fall back to the safe assumption and leave the passenger airbag switched off, which is why the passenger airbag warning lamp may stay lit with an adult clearly sitting there.
Likely causes
Start here
- Faulty seat belt tension sensor · specialist
- Damaged wiring under the front seats · specialist
- Corroded or loose connector · specialist
Less common
- Faulty occupant classification module · specialist
- Faulty restraints control module · specialist
Symptoms
Components involved
Information, not instruction
CarGeek is a reference, not a service manual. Its pages are written from public sources and from what other people have found, never from a manufacturer's own service information, so they can be wrong or incomplete for your particular vehicle. Some of what they describe carries real risk: high voltage, fuel under pressure, stored energy, hot and moving parts.
Have anything you intend to act on checked by a trained person against the manufacturer's own procedure for your vehicle. Nothing here replaces that procedure.
Community experience
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