1999 Toyota Tacoma Airbag sensor

I am checking out a 1999 Toyota Tacoma 3.4L 6cylinder PreRunner. It looks to be in good shape for the price. The only thing is that it has the airbag sensor light on. It was glanced by a car in the parking lot on the front. The scratch is pretty minimal and no airbags were deployed however the airbag sensor light on the dashboard remains on. Any suggestions or precautions?

 

Hey Swivot,

The pregnant man airbag indicator light comes on sporadically all the time on mine, and it is been doing this for a good five years.

Take it easy,
Paul

 

there's lot of things that can cause the airbag light to come on.
What the SRS sytems does, each time you start the truck, is to check for electrical continuity in the system. If it finds out there's no continuity somewhere, the light will come on. Bad continuity is most of the time caused by a bad sensor:

Steering wheel clockspring (also known as spiral cable)
- Though when this one is going bad, it is usually accompanied by other symptoms such as horn not working, cruise control problems, turn signals coming on for no reason, and of course, the airbag light (one giveaway sign is when any of these problems happens especially when the steering wheel is being rotated)

crash sensors at the front of the truck (they sometimes corrode and go bad)

seat belt pretensionners

passenger airbag on/off switch

sensors under the seats

airbag ECU or airbags themselves, but it is very rare to see these failing

to be sure of which one it can be, get the codes pulled out of the truck

 

Thanks for the tip Onakat.

 

Dear Onakat,

How are you? You made some excellent suggestions as far as repairing the pregnant man dashboard indicator on our truck. When it first started happening, I thought my Tacoma was really on to something about me being pregnant because it was about five years ago I became 35 pounds pregnant.

The pregnant man dashboard indicator is not accompanied by any other symptoms. Although the seat belt indicator used to come on as the Tacoma was accelerating through the gears, it has not done this recently.

The problem is not really annoying for me to anything about it. I mean this truck is almost twenty years old. Like you said, sensors corrode and go bad over time. It is not really worth my time to chase down the airbag sensor for just this one sporadic pregnant man indicator dashboard light problem.

Take it easy,
Paul

 

It's not a problem that will prevent your truck from running, so if it runs well, that's good.

The only thing that can happen is that in case of an accident, the airbags might not deploy, which is a potential safety issue for you or anyone driving the truck

If your problem is sporadic, might just be a loose connector somewhere

 

I thought about someting else:

You say the truck was bumped into in a parking lot, right? Do you know if the airbag light is a result of this? If yes, might be why it is on

Sometimes the crash sensors can be triggered but not to the point of deploying the airbags. In this case you need to have a SRS system reset

Anyway, getting the codes pulled out of the truck is the best way to know what's going on

 

The truck would really have to get hit hard to cause the sensors to be affected. They are on the inner frame rails several inches back from the front of the truck. I wouldnt worry about a slight glancing blow to the front of the truck to have done anything to affect the sensors.