Air Bag Not Deploy problems of the 2000 Volkswagen New Beetle

2000 Volkswagen New Beetle recently my 2000 Volkswagen New Beetle had the airbag light come on. I scoured the internet to find possible causes and to my amazement, many people suffer from the same problem. It appears that the sensors and wire harnesses in the New Beetles frequently fail triggering the airbag light to come on. I was told by an service tech. That when the airbag light is on, the airbags become deactivated, which seems to pose an extremely huge safety concern, seeing as the New Beetle suffers many defects regarding the airbags. Thankfully, the problem in mine is the driver side airbag wire harness located under the driver seat. The wire length is not sufficient enough to with stand a lot of seat movement. Moving the seats forward too many times can actually cause these wires to break in half, which happened in my case, deactivating all the airbags and bringing up an error in the system. The dealership doesn't make the matter any better, by saying that I will have to pay $600. 00 to replace not only the wire harness, but the side airbag as it comes as a complete package and the harness is not sold separately. In this economy, I cannot afford to replace an entire perfectly good airbag for a simple wire, so I am stuck having to drive around knowing that my airbags will not deploy if I get into an accident or possibly deploy prematurely without any cause. I believe that this issue should be looked at, since it not only affects the 2000 model, but all models up to 2006. Volkswagen should be held accountable for selling a product designed for occupant safety, that fails before the rest of the vehicle.

Airbag system defective, requiring repairs and replacements, including airbag replacements, 11 different times. Since system does not work and airbags do not deploy when sensors are on, this is clearly a safety issue.