Air Bag Light On GM Truck How to Fix This Common Sensor Problem

On this GMC pickup truck, we have an airbag light on. In this video, I'm going to show you how to check out what's wrong with it and how to fix it. It's probably the same problem that you have on your truck.

Unfortunately, if you do not have a higher-end scan tool, you're not going to be able to check the airbag system out. You need a scan tool that can actually talk to different modules or communicate with different modules to find any codes. So, we're going to go into the SIR module, which is the airbag module, and we're going to read fault codes, display, display DTCs. And these are the DTCs that we have.

Okay, we're not worried about this one. This is due to... This is something else. But this is the code that we're worried about right now, the B0091, and that's the front impact sensor. And it's failed and it's current, so let's take a look at this sensor.

Underneath the front bumper, you'll see this is where the impact sensor is. Now, some vehicles have just one in the center like this, or some have two on the side. Some, it'll be attached to the rail right here. You've just got to pull this shield down.

So, a lot of times, you get corrosion inside the sensor. And you want to make sure you disconnect the battery whenever you're dealing with this sensor, so disconnect the negative terminal. And you can see there is actually corrosion in here, and it's actually split in the sensor itself. And this just should be a block right here, and it has split open, so this sensor is bad. With the battery disconnected, you can disconnect the sensor connector here. Just use a pick, slide this lock out, and push down on this lock, and then take the connector up. You can look down in those connector ends right there, and just make sure you don't see any corrosion, nothing green. That looks pretty good.

Now, if you had a code for just one sensor, if it was a right sensor or a left sensor, you can normally switch them, and then re-hook up the battery, and then test check your code and see if your code moved. If it did move, you know that was the bad sensor. In our case, we just have one, so we just need to replace the sensor. All right.

So, the reason why these sensors fail is this metal sleeve in here. It will get rusted and start corroding, and as it corrodes, it's gonna expand and it actually splits the plastic. So, then, that breaks the seal and moisture gets in there and causes this sensor to fail.

After the sensors are replaced and the battery's reconnected, we can clear the fault codes. Are you sure you want to clear them? Yes. Success. We can recheck, make sure there's no codes. No codes, so we should be good to go.

So that's the failure that we found with this GMC pickup truck. Now, that's a very common failure. You could have other failures, but that's the most common. I hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, make sure you subscribe to our channel, ring the bell, turn on all notifications, so you don't miss any of our videos.