Door Open Switch
 

Hey guys,

So I posted a while back about not being able to activate my alarm for the life of me. I think I figured out what's going on. My car seems to have no idea when the driver's side door is open. When I open the door, the door lights don't turn on, the window doesn't go down, and the door open warning light on the dash doesn't light up. All of these do work for the passenger door. This means that the step for alarm activation where you have to open the door doesn't work, because the car has no idea that I opened the door. This also causes problems for the auto headlights because the car waits for you to leave the car and lock it before it decides to turn off the lights. With this problem, my car thinks that I've never left the car.

I was gonna probe things with a multimeter and try to track down the problem before I take it to the dealership to have them take a look at it. I wanted to see if anyone on here has any ideas on what places to check other than the switch itself.

Thanks a bunch!

Check with your dealer. That's what your warranty is for :)

Yeahhhhhh. I took it there last week for the headlight and alarm problem, before I realized it was actually all the door switch. It took them like 3 hours to figure out that they couldn't figure it out. I'm ok with taking it back, but I wanna see if I can easily figure out the problem before them. Gotta put my electrical engineering degree to good use!

hopefully something like this is covered by warranty, if you end up taking it back.

The only way I see you fixing this is by probing every single contact on the switch, then pull the wiring diagram and probe every single contact on the switch->IBU->fuse box.

Sounds like it'll take longer than 3 hours, but I'm not a spark-e.

Well, I figured it out and it took less than 5 minutes, haha. I did some more searching around, and I came across a DIY to disable the auto up/down on the windows. It suggested using electrical tape to cover the bolt on the sensor so the ground is permanently disconnected. So I found out that the sensor uses its own bolt as its ground. Lo and behold, squeezing the sensor to the bolt made it work! Just tightened that bolt and was on my way.

Five minutes of research and 30 seconds of diagnosing, fixing, and testing...

nice... they DIY section comes to the rescue yet again. It's already helped me out several times too!

So I think I just found the fix? I was having the same issue where my door wouldn’t know when it was opened and closed so my window never did that thing where it was crack open when it’s opened and close when the doors shut

I simply pressed the door switch in all the way and held it for a second and let it go, suddenly that light on the under side of the door came on and it knew it was open! Now everything works fine