So many of us have or will replace seats in our cars. I have a 2007 335i with 186K. Because of my attachment to cars i won't be getting rid of her for sometime if ever. I maintain her and try to keep her looking like new. With that many miles, my drivers seat was looking like hell. The rest of the seats are near perfect. I decided to buy a drivers seat from a donor car. Good deal and the leather looked like new. Only difference was it was not a heated seat like the one that came with the car. Not a big deal here in Arizona. I thought it would be an easy plug and play switch. Put the new seat in and, as many of you have already guessed, airbag and seatbelt light are on. Did a search and tried several things including unplugging the seat with the ignition off, taking the negative off the battery and reinstalling, etc; all to no avail. I purchased a MAOZUA C110+ scanner and code eraser from ebay. It was cheap so why not. Tried to erase the the light, no go. But the scanner was able to tell me something that should have been obvious. The seat belt tensioner had been engaged. That's a problem since they are a one and done component. So the donor had an event that engaged the seat belt tensioner but it was not enough to deploy the seat airbag. Fortunately, I still had my old seat so I switched the seatbelt tensioner off that seat with the used one on the "new" seat. Disconnected the negative on the battery (which is a must), reinstalled and rescanned. The code was still stored but with the unused seat belt tensioner now in place I was able to clear the code and I am good to go. I'm attaching a pic of the used and unused tensioner for reference. You can see the differences, including the pulled down seat latch and the end of the cable sticking out the front of the tensioner, on the used one. Hope this saves some people some time.
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