the saga continues with my 530d. yesterday the seat belt light and airbag light came on when my wife was in the car and stayed on regardless of the fact her seat belt was plugged in. did some checking and cleaned contacts in the seat pad sensor connection but to no avail. I have purchased a by pass device off Ebay to fit in the hope the problem is either the passenger of drivers seat pad indicating someone is in the seat without a belt on. anyone else had this issue before as it appears common from the comments on internet. also anyone had experience of these seat pad emulators. cheers

Simon

Sounds exactly like the occupancy mat, as you've figured out. On the E39 there is only an occupancy sensor in the passenger seat, not the drivers. Not sure if the same applies to the E6x but I can't see why they'd change. The point of the sensor was to determine whether or not the passender side airbags needed to be deployed in the event of an accident - no point wasting ££££s airbags for an empty seat. The bypass "modules", will simply fool the car into thinking that someone's always in that seat, which could potentially be expensive if you have a crash. On older cars like mine, a crash that deploys airbags is likely to have written the car off anyway so I wouldn't be worrying about it.

No such mat was fitted to the drivers seat as the driver is always likely to be there in an airbag event, obviously :P

Simon get the codes as it could be the seat mats at fault or the seat belt buckles or an airbag ECU no point in guessing.

Regards

Steve

did the codes and discovered it was the driver seat belt tensioner that had a broken wire, it had been cut by the seat as it had moved. all sorted now thanks just the rear parking sensor playing up now.