My fiesta ST's seat belt pretensioner. A rant.

[ryu88]

So, I bought a little Kicker hide-away subwoofer to install in my Fiesta ST a few weeks ago. Not being that hands-on myself, I took it to Autobarn to get it installed. The guy suggested it go under the passenger side seat. Seemed like a good idea to me.

So we go in to pick it up. Apparently, the seat belt pretensioner in the passenger's side went off. The autobarn guy was saying as he was putting some current down the wires to confirm the right audio wire, he must have put some current down the one that connects to the pretensioner too. Although he claims that it didn't go off right away. It was after about 10 mins there was a small bang and a little bit of smoke from under the seat. Obviously it was the charges going off.

So when we rock up, the seatbelt is rock solid tight and impossible to move. We learnt then that once the pretensioner goes off, the part needs to be fully replaced.

The managers at autobarn were not very helpful, and weren't even offering a discount on the install. It was left to the young guy who installed it to assure us would arrange for it to go into Ford to be repaired at autobarn's cost. He also offered a discount, which from his managers reaction, seemed to be coming out of this guy's own pocket. Poor kid.

Anyway, it took about a week for Ford to be ready to take the car in. They had order the part from Victoria. I didn't drive the car, really in case the was something else wrong with the airbag system.

Once it got to Ford, they apparently installed the part, but couldn't figure out why the airbag notification light wouldn't switch off. Turns out I was right about the airbag system being deactivated. So it being a Friday and my hesitation to drive the car, we told them to keep it over the weekend and look at it again on Monday.

On Monday, they figured out that the crash sensor had been triggered also, so they would have order that part and replace it. So they got the part the next day and replaced it. The airbag light still wouldn't go off.

Ford then figured out they needed to replace the restraint control module. The part had to be ordered from overseas. Apparently no one in Australia has crashed the ST yet, so they were going to be the first ones to install one. Lord help me.

So they ordered it, said it wouldn't arrive until the next week.. the Queens Birthday Monday, so they'd install on Tuesday.

They did the job on Tuesday arvo. Said they'd like to keep overnight to make sure it was right on the morning. Apparently it was (according to my odo... looks like they test drives amount to about 4kms). So my gf picked it up yesterday.

One final gripe...As she was about to drive away, she noticed Ford had put the subwoofer controller right on the airbag panel at the drivers knees. She recalled the guys at autobarn had done a neat job and stuck it to the side, purposely not on the airbag panel. As she pointed this out to the Ford guy, the controller actually fell off due to the cheap double sided tape they had used. So they had to fix that up too.

All in all, it's been a hell of a debacle. Been without my car for 3 weeks essentially. I didn't think the little job of installing a little sub could lead to such a problem. I also can't believe Ford don't know their own car enough to figure out all of the parts needed in the one go! What a joke.

At the very least, the invoice got sent to autobarn.

Sorry about the long story..just wanted to have a bit of a rant.