I was given a 2004 Lancer ES with over 200K miles whose prior owner doesn't know its history on the SRS airbag light being on.
They said it was on since they got the car and I believe them because they gave me the car for free as my first car.
The dealer replaced the airbags under recall which is who brought it to my attention.
I paid them over $100 to replace fuses and relays in the fusebox located on top of the left side driver front wheel well, but when they did, they told me the tab for the wiring harness is MISSING (see photo attached).
What?
There's no way that tab "should" be missing (if someone wanted to disable the airbag all they'd need to do is pull the fuse).
But it's missing. And I need to fix it.
I tried jumping across it with a romex wire but I couldn't make contact with the missing metal in the harness below.
Have you ever seen this strange missing connection before?
Is it a known problem with the wiring harness for the SRS airbag system?
What would you do to least expensively fix it so that the airbags work?

 

Assuming the wire is still there, you should be able to buy one of those tabs, splice it onto the wire, and plug it in where it's supposed to go. I am pretty sure it's a standard blade connector, in which case your cost would be like $5 for a pack of 10.