How to Replace Steering Wheel Air Bag 1997-2006 BMW 325Xi

What's up, guys? I'm Andy from 1A Auto. In this video, I'm going to show you how to replace the steering wheel airbag on this 2001 BMW 325xi. If you need parts for your vehicle, click the link in the description, head over to 1aauto.com.

With the trunk open, over on the right side or the passenger side, there should be a cover that goes right here. This vehicle doesn't have one, but you're going to want to remove that cover. Battery is located right here. First thing I'm going to do is take a 10mm socket and a ratchet, loosen up this nut for the negative terminal. That's loose. Slide off the cable, slide it out of the way.

You want to make sure you disconnect the battery before you take the airbag off because you don't want the airbag system seeing that the airbag is out. You'll get an airbag light. What we're going to do is after disconnecting the battery, just put the key in the ignition, turn the wheel to the side like this, disconnect the key, then I'm going to take a Torx driver. Now, this is actually really difficult. There's two holes. There's one hole in the bottom, one hole on the top. Now, you need the driver because you need the length, otherwise, a socket is probably not going to fit back there, but then this driver actually has a hole right here, so what we can do is to get some leverage we can put another pocket screwdriver or something in the hole, and then break this screw free.

Generally, it's very difficult to at least get that screw broken free. You can do the same on this side. If you don't have enough room here, what you can do is you can telescope the wheel out, bring it down, see if you have more room. We had more room. Let me try to break this free this way. That's really on there pretty good. Loosen that up, and that's loose. Take the key, turn the wheel back to straight, take the key out. Now, you can just grab this airbag, you can disconnect it over here. There's a connector right here. Disconnect it right there, and then disconnect this connector. This goes to the switches. When you have the airbag out of the vehicle and you want to place it down, make sure you always place it with the bag part facing up. You don't want it to explode this way if it exploded by accident.

Take the airbag, we want to connect these connectors. This one goes right here, just line it up. It is slotted, and then the same with this one. That one is going to go right there. Just line that up in position just like that. Take the key, just rotate the steering wheel. Take the T25 Driver. You can wiggle the airbag to see if you got that started. Tighten that up pretty snug. That's good, and same with the top one. If you have trouble getting this one in, you can twist the steering wheel back the other way. It's a little bit easier to tighten it from underneath here. Tighten that one snug, and you're good. You're all set to hook the battery up.

We can take the negative side, connect the negative side. Take the same 10mm socket and ratchet, tighten it up. That's good. At this point, if you had that cover, you're going to want to put the cover back where it goes.

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