With the recent addition of swanky “extended leather” armrests on the front doors of my 3dr facelift Noggy S3 (rears still to do but haven’t had time yet) I thought I’d see about fitting a leather airbag cover that the TTRS has. It’s not possible to fit the TT airbag over to the S3 wheel so I had a custom airbag cover made online. It took about 4 weeks from point of order to delivery. I was impressed with the quality and the leather really smells good!!
I wasn’t particularly looking forward to this job but I found a really helpful tutorial for the smaller facelift airbag cover on YouTube.
Overall I’d say the most difficult part is releasing the tabs for the original airbag cover. For me I could release one side easier than the other. I just kept going and eventually after about 30mins I got it off
Once the airbag cover was removed it was a simple case of swapping over with the leather replacement and re-fitting. Not difficult but take your time and sit down at a table and swap over carefully.
After refitting and admiring my work, I reconnected the battery negative lead and turned on the vehicle. Well…..I must have had about 10 errors pop up on the dash! I’ll be honest I really thought I’d broken something!! I went through the list of failures, “steering fault - you can continue driving” didn’t inspire me with confidence, but when I saw things like “park assist: unavailable” I thought this must be to do with the battery being disconnected as I hadn’t touched anything to do with that. So, I took the car for a short drive and all of the faults disappeared except for “cruise control unavailable.” I stopped the car, restarted the engine, and then that was gone too. I cleared all the error logs when I returned home with VCDS and the car is now back to normal.
I disconnect the battery and reconnect it all the time on my old 2002 8L S3 and it doesn’t complain about anything but these days, modern cars are clearly very sensitive about disconnecting and reconnecting the battery.
Anyway, here is a before and after pic. I’m really happy with it. What do you all think?
I wasn’t particularly looking forward to this job but I found a really helpful tutorial for the smaller facelift airbag cover on YouTube.
Overall I’d say the most difficult part is releasing the tabs for the original airbag cover. For me I could release one side easier than the other. I just kept going and eventually after about 30mins I got it off
Once the airbag cover was removed it was a simple case of swapping over with the leather replacement and re-fitting. Not difficult but take your time and sit down at a table and swap over carefully.
After refitting and admiring my work, I reconnected the battery negative lead and turned on the vehicle. Well…..I must have had about 10 errors pop up on the dash! I’ll be honest I really thought I’d broken something!! I went through the list of failures, “steering fault - you can continue driving” didn’t inspire me with confidence, but when I saw things like “park assist: unavailable” I thought this must be to do with the battery being disconnected as I hadn’t touched anything to do with that. So, I took the car for a short drive and all of the faults disappeared except for “cruise control unavailable.” I stopped the car, restarted the engine, and then that was gone too. I cleared all the error logs when I returned home with VCDS and the car is now back to normal.
I disconnect the battery and reconnect it all the time on my old 2002 8L S3 and it doesn’t complain about anything but these days, modern cars are clearly very sensitive about disconnecting and reconnecting the battery.
Anyway, here is a before and after pic. I’m really happy with it. What do you all think?
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