I am still bitter from this bad experience.
I want to share it with everyone and to warn you how expensive it is to do repairs out of warrantly.
Last month my car (Model 3 SR+ , 2019, 90k miles, out of warranty) started showing an RCM_a056 error (Front passenger safety restraint system fault) every time I depart.
A mobile technician came in and tried a fix that didn't work. They sent me to the service center. The original quote grew from $200 to $2000 and once the work is done they arrived at $2,800. After negotiating hard, I managed to lower it to $2,650.
The most rediculous thing is that the new sensor itself costs just $11, it is listed in the invoice.
Here is a bit of technical details for anyone interested:
The sensor detects if an adult or a small child is sitting in the front passenger seat, by meauring the weight.
In a crash, if an adult is in the seat, the airbag in front of him will deploy; for a child, the airbag will not deploy, to avoid killing it.
The old seat sesnor (part 1121234-70-B, see picture below) sits under the passenger seat cussion and connects to a black plastic box ( part 1100036-00-C, I think Tesla calls it OCS, aka occupancy control system) under the seat. From there, it is plugged into the "right seat harness" that goes under the right front door sill to the front airbag. You can see a guy angrily yanking it out from a seat at
.
A brief research shows that this desigh has given Tesla quite a lot of troubles, like random errors showing up due to interefence from phones);
They used a "OCS filter module", part 1505034-00-B alog with a ferrite ring to try fixing these inteference problems. This is what the tesla mobile technician tried to do for me, but it didn't work, as my seat sensor was faulty.
So sometime in the last few years tesla overhauled their faulty design and started using a different seat sensor (part 099592-00-F). Unfortunatelly, it is not compattible with the front airbag, so replacing he sensor requires replacing the front airbag too, which inflates the repair costs. Strangely, the "OCS, aka occupancy control system" black box under the seat does not need replacement; my car still has the original one.
Here are the 3 repair items in my invoice:
- Retrofit SBR in OCSEquipped Front Passenger Seat -Remove and Replace : $ 187 plus 1 hour of labor.
- Replace Front PassengerAirbag And Update Vehicle Configuration: $995.20 plus 2 hours of labor.
- Trim - Cushion - FrontPassenger Seat (Remove & Replace): $880 plus 1.74 hours of labor.
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Total: $2,781.
Finally, mu grudge is: Tesla revamped their faulty seat sensor design which involves replacing more just the sensor. I had to paid thousands of dollars more for that.
Enjoy your Tesla 3, I still like mine after this.