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Author Topic: Enabling side airbags on a GTI previously equipped with Recaro Wingbacks  (Read 916 times)

Offline owheel

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Hello everyone, this is my first post so I'll introduce myself as well!

I recently picked up a 2008 3 door GTI in black, and I love it! It's such a laugh to drive around!

When I bought the car it came with the Recaro wingback seats and they appear to have been fitted from factory. Unfortunately I needed the money rather than the seats, so I've replaced them with some really good condition ED30 seats. The issue is that the wingbacks didn't have airbags and the ED30 seats do. There are no airbag lights on because the car doesn't know that it has side airbags, but I would ideally like to get these airbags working.

I took the car to a garage with VCDS who hooked it up and we plugged the airbags in to see what happened. The car registered faults of airbag resistance being too low that could only be cleared if the airbag was unplugged. We then tried the adaption screen for the airbag controller to enable airbag channels 3 and 4 which are the driver and passenger side airbags. When attempting to read these channels VCDS produced "ERROR CHANNEL NOT FOUND". Im guessing this airbag module has been configured not to have channels 3 and 4 so that the controller doesn't throw a fault with the wingback seats.

To fix this, is it as simple as installing a new standard airbag module from a 3 door mk5 golf and plugging everything in? I'm guessing it probably isn't... Has anyone got any ideas or guidance? Thanks!