I bought my 04 Ralliart a couple of weeks ago from a Mitsubishi dealer. The car had been auctioned twice a few months apart, so I had some concerns about that.

I have had some bad luck with used cars in the past. I bought my wife an Odyssey from a used car dealer in Tampa. We found out that it didn't have any airbags after she t-boned a kid that ran a stop sign. Fortunately, her injuries were minor.

Naturally, I'm concerned that this could happen again, especially when you consider that 50,000 airbags a year are stolen in the US.

The 04 ralliart has side airbags in the front seats. Today I was messing with the car and saw that the passenger seat had a loose nut on one of the mounting studs. I checked the drivers side, and found that the adjusting wheel for the seat base had fallen off. Someone had failed to replace the snap ring properly.

So, it looks possible that the seats have been removed, and maybe dismantled.

I'm taking the car back to the dealer in a couple of days to get the timing/BS belts replaced, tranny flushed, and hopefully get them to foot the replacement for the cooling fan controller that's getting ready to crap out. If I had bought the car somewhere else, I would take it into a Mitsubishi dealer and have them pull the passenger side or steering wheel panel to verify that the bag was there, but since I bought the car there I don't know if I trust them to do it.

Any comments or suggestions?

For more information on airbag theft, you can start at the Department of Transportation website:
http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/staticfiles...les/airbag.pdf

 

I never heard of someone stealing airbags. This is news to me.

Do the seats in your RA have the little tag at about the height where the seat belt is with SRS printed on em?

 

It would throw an srs light if they were not there, One way to be sure is when you start the car and all of the dummy lights come on for a brief second just maker sure srs flashes and if it does there is no worries.

Any shop could hook up a modis scanner and check history etc.

 

If they were a smart thief, they probably would have used a resistor. BAM no SRS light...

 

No way as todays srs systems do a self check of the system everytime the car is started and there is more to an srs system such as air bags,side airbags,shock sensors,seatbelt pretensioners, g sensors etc there is no real way to fool the system ecm with out going to great effort which would be worthless.

Maybe 8-10 years ago this could be done but not on todays cars with complex srs systems.

 

Yeah, that's what they do. My odyssey never threw a code, and never had the warning light stay on.

I'm sure that it's easier to trick the airbag sensor than it would be to trick exhaust sensors, but there's a lot of late model cars running around with no cats.

Thanks for responding so quickly to my post.

 

I would imagine that you could just unzip the back of the seat and take a look. Not sure though, since my 04 doesn't have the side airbags. As for the steering wheel, the wheel cover is part of the airbag assembly, so it'd be pretty obvious if it was missing.

 

can't be done in newer cars, An odyssey is an older car which it can be done to with ease esp honda as they use a primitive srs system.

Mitsu uses a complex srs system and this would be so hard to do that you would have to be nothing short of a engineer to achieve this and even then why bother with lancer airbags? If you are that smart you should be worring about higher end stuff like Ferrari,porsche bmw etc where it would pay to do this not some run of the mill mitsubishi

 

I don't know if it's that hard to do. There's several of them on ebay:

http://motors.shop.ebay.com/__?_from...ir+bag&_sacat=

 

Sorry, missed your question. Yeah, the tags are there.

 

the air bags from a lancer are worth 150-200.00 which makes it not worth the hassle where as honda a few years ago used the same airbag in almost all of their cars which made them in high demand.

So for 200.00 I highly doubt anyone would go through all the effort for a set of lancer airbags that are only for a lancer.

I seriously would not worry about it as there is no demand for lancer airbags on the black market