According to documents filed with the National Highway Traffic Administration (NHTSA), Porsche has spent a year working out that it needs to recall certain 2022-2023 Porsche Taycan vehicles due to the possibility of the passenger airbag being mistakenly disabled.
Modern cars have sensors in the seat that deactivate the passenger airbag when nobody is sitting there, so if there is an accident, it doesn’t go off needlessly and end up costing even more to repair the vehicle. However, if there is someone sitting in the passenger seat during a crash and the airbag doesn’t go off, well, that’s not good at all.
A Long Process
In the additional documentation with the recall notice, we see that Porsche became aware there may be an issue in March 2024, but couldn’t replicate the malfunction. The German performance car brand showed due diligence, though, and waited for a vehicle to show up with the issue. It showed up in the US, so Porsche sent specialists over to investigate. It must have been incredibly frustrating trying to find the issue due to it being intermittent, and they found that “at least some faults were resolved by handling or using the seat.”
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A “root cause analysis” led the specialists to suspect the issue was due to errors in the crimping process on the connector to the heating pad in the seat cushion. A loose connection would explain why the problem is intermittent and could be temporarily fixed by moving the seat. Simple issues like these can be the cause of bigger problems more often than one might think.
Porsche also needed to figure out if the airbag was actually being, or remaining, turned off while the warning message was showing. More time was spent using incoming reports and looking at the technical differences in systems to work out what Porsche calls a “clean date.”
Porsche Decides It’s A Real Problem
With the potentially affected Taycans identified on April 2, 2025, Porsche decided there is a safety defect, and it should recall the affected vehicles “out of an abundance of caution.” A recall is not always a bad thing, and we’re sure most would agree that the inconvenience of a recall is better than facing the potential risks of an unsafe car, especially one as quick and powerful as this.
The fix is almost as comically simple as the idea of the connection to the heating pad on a seat turning off the airbag. Owners will take their car to a dealer to have the passenger seat cushion replaced with an “optimized” seat cushion under the Porsche New Car Limited Warranty.
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The specific Taycan production dates for recall are January 3, 2022, through March 31, 2023. Customers affected by the recall will be notified within 60 days of the NHTSA report, which is dated April 8, 2025. If you happen to own, or think you might own, one of the affected Taycans, Porsche says customers should take their vehicle to a dealership for inspection or repair as soon as possible.
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