Retrieve/Clear Continuous DTCs

During vehicle operation the air bag Electronic Crash Sensor (ECS) module will detect and store both intermittent and hard failure DTCs in nonvolatile memory. The DTC strategy employed by the ECS incorporates a time-out scheme for determining when a concern exists in the system. This requires a concern to exist for up to one minute in the system before the ECS will detect it. For the ECS to determine that a concern no longer exists, the concern must be absent for up to one minute. The actual detection time-outs vary with each DTC. The DTCs can be retrieved with the scan tool using the retrieve/clear continuous DTCs option. Any DTCs stored in the ECS will be displayed on the scan tool along with a brief description of the DTC. If no DTCs are present, the scan tool will display a SYSTEM PASSED message. This option can also be used to clear DTCs from the ECS memory, as long as the concern no longer exists. Once 254 key cycles have been recorded since the concern was last detected, the DTC will automatically be removed from memory.

NOTE: Before proceeding with the clearing operation, make note of the DTCs displayed, because once cleared, they cannot be retrieved.

Connect the scan tool to the Data Link Connector (DLC). Follow the scan tool instructions to retrieve or clear the DTCs.

The scan tool will retrieve and display hard DTCs that remain after clearing DTCs. Hard DTCs are those that are still detected by the ECS after the clearing operation.