Airbag
The airbag system has found a fault and switched itself off. In a crash the airbag will not deploy — while the car drives as usual, which makes it easy to forget. The culprit is usually not the charge itself but the connector under a front seat: it is rated for a handful of matings, and moving the seat once with the plug undone is enough to lose contact. The second most common cause is a worn clock spring in the steering wheel: the driver airbag reaches the module through it, and the lamp then comes on while turning the wheel rather than all the time. ⚠️ The lamp cannot be «cleared» with an ordinary adapter through the OBD-II socket: the airbag module lives on its own bus and answers only a scanner that knows how to talk to it.
What to do now
- Think back to whether a seat was removed recently: the connector under it works loose most often.
- Do not put it off: this is the one lamp whose cost is not measured in money.
- You will need a workshop — reading the airbag module takes a proper scanner.
- After an airbag has fired the lamp does not go out by itself: the module stores a crash record, and clearing it is a separate job — not an «erase codes» through an adapter.
Codes usually behind it
The lamp only says that something is wrong. The code says what exactly — read it with an adapter and look it up here.
What to read next
How the app helps
CarScan reads the codes behind the lamp through an OBD-II adapter, explains them in plain words and puts them into a report you can show to a mechanic.