Ermy was first purchased as a £200 non runner from eBay, though not intentionally. The auction ended at £600 and the day before she was due for collection she refused to start. Fortunately the seller was just keen to get rid of it and offered it up for £200, plus petrol money for a mates tow truck.
Bargain. When she finally arrived we popped the key in and sat down to work out what was wrong and we’re blown away by the depth, breadth and inaccuracy of the error codes found online.
One set of codes in particular resulted in a complete dash removal to get to the airbag ECU, as the error codes provided across numerous sites all failed to mention that the Mk2 had both a long and short flash error codes, signifying 10’s and 1’s. Or at least some models, of a specific year did
The error codes we finally found for the Mk2, were as follows -
01-03 SRS Control Module 05 Wiring Harness Between SAS Control Module & Side Air Bag Sensor 06 Driver’s Air Bag Module 07 Passenger’s Air Bag Module 11 Driver’s Side Seat Belt Pretensioner System 12 Passenger’s Side Seat Belt Pretensioner System 21 Side Impact Air Bag Sensor Connector Poor Connection Driver’s Side 22, 25 & 26 Drivers Side Impact Air Bag Module 23 Battery Voltage 31 Side Impact Air Bag Sensor Connector Poor Connection Passenger’s Side 32-37 Passenger Side Impact Air Bag Module 91 Air Bag System Warning Lamp Circuit
Where 1 long flash = 10, 2 long flashes = 20 etc, 1 short flash = 1, 2 short flashes = 2. So, 3 long flashes and 2 short = 32.
We finally diagnosed the issue as a loose seat belt pretensioner, which would have been much easier to get to than the under dash ECU.
Annoyingly the error codes are not even referenced in the multiple books we have on the MX5, so we didn’t even have a reliable source to work from that time, it was helpful internet forums all the way. Still, we learnt…. Something.