My wife is small and most days it reads "passenger airbag off."

Happens for both of my 4Runners, the dealer seemed stumped as to why--I'm guessing it's her weight (88-89 pounds).

Is this safe for her? I can't imagine a 100 pound person needing an airbag that much more than someone 10 pounds lighter. Should I just take her to Red Robin 2-3 nights a week?

The limitation is height as much as weight. They are assuming (rightly so) that short people like kids weigh less than average height people. Easier to do a weight sensor than a height sensor. Position of airbag deployment in relationship to the head and shoulders is very important. Not too high, not too low, etc. 90 lbs though should be enough to satisfy conditions. 66lbs comes to mind...

It's not as safe as having the airbag activated but rewiring to disable the weight sensor or bypassing ANYTHING in the airbag circuit is not a good option. Remember a few short years ago we had no airbags or even shoulder belts. The only time we used seatbelts was when 4 wheeling at a high rate of speed and that was only to keep from smashing our heads against the roof.

Easy enough to test though:
Have her get in and sit in her normal seating position, with vehicle started and her belted in.
Start adding weight (small 5lb barbells etc) until the light goes off. If it does not after a few barbells then there is a problem.

I had her sit down with her purse (full of heavy crap) and it went back to ON. Went back to OFF when she put it on the floor, took a few seconds, tho.

I guess Toyota feels that the airbag is more dangerous than no airbag for people her size?

The airbag uses a seat weight sensor to infer if there is a small child (or small wife) in the seat. It adjusts the airbag deployment accordingly. While I don't know what the cut off weight is, the idea is that if you have an infant car seat in the seat, etc you don't want the airbag to deploy.

Most European delivered cars have a switch that will allow you to turn off the passenger side airbag manually as well.

So I guess you are left with a couple options:

• Move her to the back seat,
• Take her to Red Robin more often,
• Have her share the seat with a cute friend,
• Not worry about it.

And I would find a dealer that knows what they are talking about. If anything I'm guessing they should be able to look up the airbag cutoff weight.

Okki

I'll go with option 3, thank you.

Two things:
Height (where the occupant comes in contact with airbag) and
Mass (F=MA as you have to have enough of it to develop the "F" as acceleration won't change. The "MA" is what will develop the "F" to make sure the airbag collapses at the required rate and the occupant does not just bounce off it)

Make sure she wears her seat belt!

Does she sit squarely in the seat with all weight on her tush? I think the magic number for the passenger weight sensor is ~79 lbs. The sensors are placed on all four corners (where the seat mounts to the rails), so maybe it could have something to do with how her natural sitting position is since shes barely past the weight threshold.

Might I suggest an all you can eat buffet 3x per week?

In the Toyota techstream testing for it .It claims 66lb sensitivity is what it's looking for. Here are the screenshots from when I tested mine..........post#7.... Seat removal/Airbag warning light?

As you push down on the seat it gives a real time reading of the weight on the screen which I didn't show a pic of.

You might want to have yours recalibrated as my 14 yr old daughter weighs 80 lbs and she activates it and has for over a year or so now.
Or feed her some Crispy donuts and ice cream daily and have your home scale recalibrated to check her weight.....jk...lol

I don't think height has anything to do with it as I had a couple barbell weights and pushed down with my hand on my front pass. seat to check mine. That made it less the a foot tall!

Hey Gary, are you sure the 66 lbs is the activation threshold and not just the weight where the sensors are suppose to zero themselves to? I was referring to this part of the FSM below, but your guess is as good as mine especially considering I am no where near 80 lbs to test this theory, lol.

Attached Images

 

You could be right as I never read that in the manual before .Just going by what techstream had with the 66 +/- 7 lbs to calibrate it and figured that was the threshold. Maybe I'll check it with some actual weights when I get a chance.

I used to do this in an ex's Honda civic on purpose to freak her out. I could trip the sensor very easily by adjusting my position on the seat. This was like 10 years ago, back in the day when I was a wee lad and weighed skinny.