Driver Seat Belt Light Flashing

Today my wife started her 08' prius and the driver's seat belt light continued to flash even with her belt latched.

Tonight I hooked up my laptop to the data port and looked for possible causes. There are no stored codes. The switch in the seat belt latch appears to be working correctly. The software reports when the buckle is engaged and when it comes out. The passenger seat weight sensors seem to be working fine - when I sit on the passenger seat i see values of upwards to 80 LBS is being reported.

There is no weight being reported on the drivers side of the car. When I sit in that seat one of the sensors reports a negative value and the other stay constant at about 2 lbs. I would think that like the passenger side something would register when sitting in the driver seat since there is a set of sensors for drivers side of car. If there is no sensor in the drivers seat then this makes perfect sense that nothing is showing up.

So my question is this - if the buckle is sensed when it is in the latch and if If there is a sensor and it is bad would this cause the car's electronics to disregard anything that is going on with the buckle/latch sensor since it thinks there is no driver sitting in the seat. Is there some connection between buckle/latch sensor and weight sensors on the drivers side.

My wife will admit herself that she is a slob. There is a lot of things that find their way under the seat and behind it. It would not be far fetched to think that something dislodged a harness or broke a wire under her seat.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance

Steve

 

Thank you for that information. I'm using the techstre

Thank you for checking into this for me. I am using VCI with Techstream. There are no codes being set. The values are weird for driver side ( one is negative lbs). I will try and post a picture of the data list from the OCS ECU. There were 4 sensor (2 for right side of car and 2 for left). Each of the four had data for both Voltage and for Weight. Can you tell from your information where that sensor/wiring would be located and if there is any part numbers for it. I'm hoping it is just a connector/harness issue.

 

I would never have occurred to me that they were calling out the 4 corners of the passenger seat cushion....
Thank you for enlightening me. Any suggestions regarding what's causing the buckle up light to keep flashing since it seems the that the Driver buckle switch is working perfectly - set condition reported when latched and unset condition when unlatched.

 

I never got this resolved. Light still blinks even though driver seat belt latched into buckle. Techstream properly recognizes that the belt is seated into the the latch and will show the buckle / latch as "SET" when inserted and then when unlatched it shows it as unset. No one except you and I have ever commented that they have the same issue. I'd be apt to change out the latch if it techstream showed it never being set but it consistently show no problem with regards to distinguishing between truly latched and unlatched.

 

So this is a confusing thread. Without my reading the whole thread over, I started it because in my particular situation, I was concerned solely about the driver's side safety belt warning chiming and blinking when i had driver seat belt buckled as well as when unbuckled. As the thread evolved some of the data points that were only relevant to the passenger side seeped into the thread. Specifically, ther passenger side is the only seat that tests for presence of a human - which makes sense. That passenger seat cushion has 4 weight sensors inside. This was very intersesting but had any bearing on my problem.

So if you are asking about the drivers side blinking and chime sounding, my prior post is all I can offer.

I do not claim to be an expert and I do recommend you have your car evaluated by professionals. I have chosen to ignore the warning lights and chimes. I was satisfied that the driver seat belt electronics were functioning as designed and were not detecting a problem. This was based solely on the ECU correctly reporting a latched/set and unlatched/unset signal. I don't know if there are other data points or integrated systems that may or may not be monitored by techstream that could be tangentially related that may point to something dire or of concern.

Without a lot of knowledge or due diligence, in my mind it was logical to conclude that I could ignore the warnings. I also figured at some point, when I took the car into the dealer I would ask them to look at it. But I never took the car back to the dealership for anything.

 

Good job and wise decision. Thank you for the update and for telling us about the solution that worked for you. Best -
Steve