B00B8: Driver Seat Occupant Position Sensor B
What to do
The car drives normally with the airbag light on. The airbag can still deploy, but without adjusting for how you are sitting. Sit upright and properly belted until it is fixed — that is the position the fallback assumes.
What this code means
The driver seat occupant position sensor B circuit is faulty.
Occupant sensing exists because a deploying airbag is dangerous to somebody in the wrong place, and the system has to know who is in the seat before it decides what to do.
The problem it solves is real and was learned expensively. Early airbags deployed at one force regardless of who was there, and they injured and killed children and small adults in crashes that would otherwise have been survivable. A bag inflating at three hundred kilometres an hour into someone sitting close to it is a weapon, which is why the industry moved to systems that can soften, delay or suppress deployment.
Two quite different questions are being asked, and the standard gives them separate codes. Classification asks who — an adult, a small adult, a child, a child seat, or an empty seat — and is answered mostly by weight. Position asks where — how far the occupant is from the airbag, and whether they are leaning into its path.
Both matter because either alone gives wrong answers. A heavy adult leaning forward is in as much danger from the bag as a light one sitting normally, and weight cannot see that.
Position sensing asks where the occupant is, not what they weigh — and "out of position" covers entirely ordinary behaviour: leaning forward to reach a control, a child kneeling up, somebody slumped asleep against the door.
A bag that is correct for an upright, belted occupant can injure the same person leaning forward, because it reaches them while still inflating rather than after it has filled. That is the danger these sensors exist to detect.
How they do it varies more than anything else in the restraint system — ultrasonic from the headliner, infrared, capacitive sensing in the seat back, or a camera — so what sensor B physically is depends entirely on the vehicle, and only its own documentation says.
Losing one usually removes the refinement rather than the airbag. The module falls back to assuming a normally seated occupant, which is safe for most people in most crashes and is exactly the assumption the system was built to stop making.
Likely causes
Start here
- Damaged wiring under the front seats · specialist
- Faulty occupant classification module · specialist
- Corroded or loose connector · specialist
Less common
- Damaged wiring harness · specialist
- Faulty restraints control module · specialist
Symptoms
Components involved
Information, not instruction
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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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