When cars were first introduced to the world, the only available safety features were a seat belt restraint. The functionality of that depended greatly on the car occupants utilizing the restraint in the first place. There were no seat belt laws on the books where car drivers and passengers were ticketed for non use of a seat belt.

Today things have changed. Bumpers are created with high impact resistance features. Seat belts automatically cover front seat occupants when the vehicle is started. Airbag are standard on most new model vehicles. The only thing left to do is encase a vehicle in a safety protection bubble as it moves down the road. Until that happens, the safest feature of any vehicle is the airbag system.

Basically an airbag is handled by a control module. This works in much the same way as a home computer. The control module is the ‘brains’ of the operation so to speak. It senses what is about to occur based on current driving conditions and notifies the system accordingly. The airbag control module also alerts the airbags as to when to deploy and when not to deploy.

Airbag control module location varies by vehicle manufacturer. The most common location is underneath one of the two front seats. There is an arrow on the outside of the casing that points in the direction of the front of the vehicle. In the event the airbags are deployed, the control module requires resetting.

Airbag Control Unit Re-Setting may or may not be required simply because one or both airbags deployed. In most cases an indication will be provided by the airbag light on the console flashing on and off. This is not enough to determine whether or not the airbag control module needs to be reset. An airbag indicator light can go off even with no airbag deployment.

A better indication that a reset is needed occurs by installing a new set of airbags into the vehicle. When this is done and the airbag light is still flashing, it is a direct sign that the airbag control module needs to be reset.

Some dealers and mechanics will tell customers that there is no way to reset a blown airbag control module. While this use to be the standard case when airbags first hit the market, it is no longer so. Virtually all airbag control modules can be reset.

Airbag control module resets average roughly ten business days to complete. The module is removed from the vehicle and sent in to be reprogrammed. Think of the process as rebooting a home computer. Basically control module resets are the same thing for a vehicle. Only the control module functions as a removable computer hard drive. It is a task best performed by mechanics that specifically deal with airbags and the related issues. Regular car dealers and mechanics are only capable of resetting fault and error codes from the airbag control module. In order for the unit to be completely reset, the hard crash data must also be reset.