Airbag & air temp sensor electrical issue on my 94 T&C

Do you have a motor vehicle department in your state? If so, you might ask the law enforcement division if such and such is legal and what not. Sometimes the regular motor vehicle department might know or can look up the state laws concerning airbags. Now if there is also a federal law, I kind of doubt that, you could call whoever does motor vehicles. NHTSA? Covering up an airbag sounds far worse than the usual odometer messing. Depending on your state, that might be encroaching upon criminal territory or serious motor vehicle infractions?? Now after guessing, I wonder what's going to be the case.

Actually I checked, there is a Federal law, your not allowed to disable mandated safety equipment without an exemption, and I don't think they would issue one for this. They would probaby issue an exemption for a switch to turn them off but not to remove them. But I don't know, I'd be interested in others opinions.

However I wonder if there's further laws broken because of the effort to hide it. It's not like the van was sold with gaping holes where the bags were supposed to be.

Ted

I would think that the vehicle would not pass a state inspection if the airbag was missing, go back to the seller/state inspector

Glenn Beasley Chrysler Tech

The State of Oregon does not require an inspection for vehicles sold through private sale, in order to issue title. In order to issue registration all that is needed is an emissions inspection. And the emissions people do not pay any attention to airbags, in fact the inspectors do not even get in the vehicle for an AWD car that is 1995 or earlier - because their dyno is a 2-tire dyno. All they do is a tailpipe sniff at 2500 rpm and look for HC levels. In fact I've already run mine through an emissions inspection station just to see if it would pass (it did)

What complicates it from a legal perspective also is the buyer I got this from was located in Washington state, and had bought the van back in March from an Oregon resident, and had never filed for a title in Washington. When I bought it in order to get title I gave the state the Oregon title, and bills of sale showing the sale from the Oregon resident to the Washington resident and then to me. All the bills of sale did was get me out of paying the penalty for late title transfer. Oregon could not of course register a Washington title, so the vehicle title history shows the prior owner before me as the Oregon owner (that sold the van in March to the Washington resident) not the Washington owner who was the actual prior owner..

Ted

How confusing??//*@#

No, it's a common scam here. Washington vehicle registration is a lot higher and worse is that they charge an adjusted sales tax on any vehicle registered there that comes in from out of state. The way the scam works is that the washington residents buy used vehicles by private sale from Oregon residents then never retitle them or register them in Washington. As long as they keep to the Washington side of the border, if the cops see expired tags on the plates they assume it's an Oregon driver and they don't have jurisdiction to write a tags ticket so they leave them alone.

If the driver gets pulled over for a moving violation they just argue that they just bought the car a week earlier and haven't titled it yet.

I have gotten very cautious now when I sell an older vehicle, I make the buyer sign and date the registration and keep copies of it when I send it in.

Ted

Interesting. Around here, one state, New Jersey, will threaten to suspend the driver's license if the car sold cannot be verified with the other state's registration. Now that gets people's attentions. Your approach sounds prudent.

That's a different deal though, and one that wouldn't stop the Oregon/Washington scam. What NJ is doing is the assumption that if the title cannot be verified (and it's the title, not the registration, I looked it up) it is a forgery that someone has created because the original title is being held by a bank or car dealer for collateral on a loan. With the Oregon/Washington scam, the title is never in question because it's never presented.

This actually does bring up another good point, though, which is the risk of buying a vehicle through private sale - with computers these days it's getting easier to forge a title. An unscruplous vehicle seller could forge a title for a vehicle held by a lienholder, and sell it through private sale, and the buyer isn't going to find out that the seller never legally owned the car until they go to title it.

This reminds me of something that happened to a friend of mine almost

20 years ago. She had bought an old early 70's car from a coworker of a friend for $400, this car was really in bad shape, ran like crap and all that. She also did not have a drivers license at the time. Anyway, she went to the DMV to get the title transferred and they wouldn't do it because the original owner hadn't signed off on the title. She took it back to the seller and it turned out he had repossessed the car from someone who he had loaned money to - and when he originally took the title as collateral when he made the initial loan, he had never got the borrower to sign over title interest. I called the original owner of the vehicle and that person of course refused to sign the title and in fact wanted the car back. She eventually got the coworker to forge the original owners signature on the title, and got it retitled with the DMV. About 6 months later the car finally did die, but that's another story.

Ted

Thought I would post an update to this posting for those interested.

I replaced the passenger airbag. I checked the drivers bag and found the bag disconnected right inside the steering wheel.

I tool the bezel for the airbag warning light off and discovered the light was gone but not only that, whoever disabled the bulb had wrecked the circuit board right around where the light goes in. So I soldered a light bulb in.

As for the belt retractor, in the 94 van neither retractor is of the explosive type that has a connection to the air bag computer. The drivers buckle has a switch in it but that's it. It must have been a spurious error message from the DRB because once I got everything back together and plugged back in, the airbag light didn't stay lit.

Needless to say when doing all this I had the battery disconnected and I also shorted all the airbag plugs before plugging them into the bags just to make sure no residual energy was left in the circuit.

And I also found out what the problem was with the ambient air temp sensor circuit. One of the previous owners of that van had decided to drill a hole under the glovebox to mount something or other. When drilling he went though the dash plastic, through the metal behind the dash, and right straight into a wiring harness. He severed one of the wires - that went to the temp sensor. The wire actually was going into the green connector that feeds all the wires for the body, back into the right side from the instrument panel.

Ted

Ted Chrysler didn't use Seat belt pretensioner on the 94 Mini Vans They Used them on the Full size vans at that year.

Glenn Beasley Chrysler Tech

I think whoever wrote the software for the DRB tool didn't know that. :-)

Ted