Original post suggests it was the passenger bag.

While the car was at the mechanics, the passenger airbag deployed (there was video of the incident from the exterior of the car) while the car was being backed into a spot...it clearly didn't hit anything and was going very slowly. So it was definitely not the fault of the driver or any external bumping of any kind.

Anyone every experience something similar?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/16/2019 04:19PM by RainyDayGarage. (view changes)

Has work been done in the steering wheel clockspring area? That would be a prime suspect.

I'm assuming you're talking about the steering wheel airbag.

Either way, I have never heard of that happening before absent recent work on the bumper area or dash. Even then, I suspect it is stunningly rare.

is that people can die when there is an errant deployment. So the way the system is designed is that the airbag has to sense a very specific pattern of signals from the crush sensors then the airbag control unit sends a coded signal to actually deploy the unit. Neither of those two things can happen with random electrical signals or power surges.

While I could not explain the details - as I expect you could - everything you said makes perfect sense. I can only imagine the liability if one of those bags went off unexpectedly.

It might be rare for Porsches, but Internet searches does show occurrences of it happening in various cars. Anyway, not even sure how they would go about finding the cause... clearly no sensors were crushed.

is that someone mishandled the airbag at some point and damaged it. Most malfunctions would trigger an airbag code but not all.

I believe that the car stores data related to the airbag deploy so if that's the case you could check that. Also, let's see the video.

With over a billion cars on the road it's not surprising that there are some reports of errant airbag deploys. But the number isn't big and probably most of those are false claims.

"fiddling with it" denotes a certain lack of concern for how really dangerous an air bag is.

Absent being fiddled with, while rare, there were reports of spurious air bag deployment. I believe in one case a two way radio was being held by its strap with the driver's hand on the wheel and the vehicle traversing rough ground and the movement of the radio over the air bag was deemed the cause of the deployment.

I have heard that there can be a deployment if a car is being worked on in the vicinity of any air bag if the proper steps are not taken. Don't quote me but I believe this involves disconnecting the battery power and giving the car's electrical system time to fully discharge (or helping it discharge to speed up the process).

'course, even once the car's electrical system has been rendered "safe" air bags must be handled with extreme caution at all times. They can possibly be triggered by static electricity. Shop manuals generally have pages of cautions regarding these things.

anecdotes about rare events lead people to make false conclusions about the likelihood