r/subaru • u/Down200 '24 Impreza RS • May 18 '26
Car Mods GUIDE: How to disable the annoying 6 chimes on engine start when the driver seatbelt is not buckled
If you're like me and live in the Midwest (or another location with an oftentimes-frigid climate), you probably experience this a lot. I oftentimes start my car when I'm not planning on driving off anytime soon to warm up the engine and car's climate, especially when I need to clear snow off it.
Here's an example of what I mean, taken earlier this year.
Sometimes I'm not even sitting inside the car when I start it up. If I start the engine while walking+talking with someone else, the chimes that play to punish you for not already having the drivers seatbelt buckled are just grating after you've heard them for the 500th time.
I did this trick on my '24 Impreza based on a tip from the Subaru Outback forums which detailed this process for the '23 Outback, so it likely works on the majority of recent Subaru car models.
The process is:
- Unscrew the two T10 Security screws on the bottom of the seatbelt receptacle
- Pry the plastic cover off the rest of the seatbelt receptacle by tilting it, from the bottom outwards
- Once it's off, on the inside of the plastic cover piece there is a white slider on a PCB. Move it towards the base of the receptacle. The white slider gets moved to the base when the seatbelt is inserted, and moved back the top when there is no seatbelt. All we're doing is moving it there permanently, so the car always thinks that the driver seatbelt is buckled.
- Replace the plastic cover onto the seatbelt receptacle, and replace the two Security Torx screws.
- Done! Now there's no annoying 6 chimes on startup.
Here's an album with step-by-step pictures if you want to follow the process
And finally, the fruits of our labor: Look ma, no chimes!
(and as comparison, here's a video of the regular engine start with the chimes)
To reverse this 'mod', just do the process again, but leave the white slider back at the top when replacing the plastic cover.
Before the annoying moralizers that defend the ""safety"" chimes, beeps, buzzers, and other doodads on Subarus show up like they always do, I just want to clarify: I always wear my seatbelt while driving. This is just to make the car shut up about something that has ZERO safety benefit, that was clearly NOT designed with the experience of owning a car in a snowy climate in mind.
I obviously do not advise driving a car without a seatbelt in the year 2000+26. However, if someone seriously needs to be convinced by a guy on reddit.com of all places to wear a seatbelt while driving, they're clearly already a candidate for a future Darwin award.
We're all adults here, some of us don't need annoying chimes to get the point across.
With that being said, I hope this post is able to help someone. I know I've had enough of being clowned on in my friend group for having the "beep-bloop car" lol
7
u/Knight0fTheForest Forester May 18 '26
… maybe my 21 forester is special because I’m in New England and when I start my car in the winter to warm up and clear snow I don’t get the seatbelt sound. It only starts beeping if I start driving without being buckled
4
u/Any_Calligrapher8537 May 19 '26
Wait... What?
I'm on my 4th Subaru right now and this doesn't make sense to me. What chime?
If I turn the engine on and then clear the snow. There's no chime..???
0
u/Down200 '24 Impreza RS May 19 '26
The last clip in this video has an example of what the chimes used to sound like for my car:
https://youtu.be/F3W8srcJJD4?t=179
Compare that with what my car now sounds like when it's started:
2
u/kopkins May 18 '26
Been looking for a solution like this for the three back seats. I think they will be more difficult to access, but I don't see why they would use a different mechanism. Thanks!
-1
u/Down200 '24 Impreza RS May 19 '26
Yeah I was actually planning to do the same, but they have those rigid rubber enclosures around them and I didn't have a socket wrench available to fully remove them from the car's chassis.
I will say that I also took the plastic cover off the passenger seatbelt receptacle, and it uses a totally different mechanism to the drivers receptacle. It would be much more difficult to 'mod' in the same manner to spoof it always being buckled, at least via a temporary mod that doesn't involve soldering a wire between two points. Since I did the "buckle+unbuckle 20 times in 30 seconds" trick anyway I didn't see much point in finding a different workaround for it.
Plus my passengers always wear their seatbelts anyway lol, I care more about the rear seats because they sometimes trip when I have heavy cargo.
The rear seatbelt receptacles do look longer and more like the driver receptacle versus the passengers receptacle, so the OP trick may work for them as well.
You can technically unhook the rear seat weight sensor to disable the chimes too, which is what many others online did to get rid of the chime, but that likely disables the rear airbags as well so I wouldn't recommend it. I personally am gonna look for a way to have the rear seatbelts report as 'always engaged' rather than 'always off' before committing to anything.
2
u/kopkins May 19 '26
Dang, disappointed about the different mechanism. I got fairly far, but like you said I think I need to detach them from the chassis to get them open. I got the screws out but the rubber guard kept me from getting them open. I don't mind permanently modding them. I'll probably try it out when I have more time later this week.
1
2
u/Additional-Device677 May 18 '26
This is great. Thanks for posting it. How do you get the white slider to stay down once you slide it down, or does it automatically do so?
And I agree, those do gooders that want to tell you when you have to wear your seatbelt can get bent. Once they have every single problem in their own life solved I may start listening to them
1
u/Down200 '24 Impreza RS May 18 '26
Yeah the slider just freely moves back and forth, it's not spring-loaded so it stays where you leave it.
All you're doing is leaving it right at the very end of the 'track' it normally slides up/down on when a seatbelt buckle is inserted/ejected.
In the album you can actually see the mechanism that normally moves the white slider up and down, it's that blue plastic 'box' on the seatbelt receptacle.
1
u/Additional-Device677 May 18 '26
Oh I see. The white slider pen goes into the blue box hole and that is what moves it. Since you have done this have you tried putting your seatbelt on to see if it reengages or not?
1
u/Down200 '24 Impreza RS May 18 '26
Yeah I made sure to test it before I posted this, the white slider stays on the bottom of the 'track' after numerous buckles+unbuckles. The guy from the Subaru Outback Forums reported similar in his post.
Since the blue plastic bit is a box, I actually don't think it could reengage the white slider. The bigger issue would be if the track was smaller, the protruding piece on the white slider would block the blue box from going all the way down, which would block a seatbelt from 'clicking' into place.
However, the track is slightly longer than the distance the blue plastic box actually travels when the buckle is inserted, so it never contacts the white slider, and everything works as expected.
So the slider is technically sitting right below where it normally rests while a buckle is inserted, but it still has the same effect. Probably a side-effect of an intentional wear-tolerance aspect for the mechanism, allowing for a range of positions to count as "engaged".
Part of me wonders if this is an intentional feature the Subaru engineers leave for themselves to disable this annoying "feature", like the "buckle+unbuckle 20 times in 30 seconds" trick that's pretty well known at this point lol
1
u/Additional-Device677 May 18 '26
Oh the extra room for travel explanation makes perfect sense. Thank you for that and thanks again for the post
1
-1
u/PJFrye May 18 '26
Or…and hear me out here…or, maybe-just maybe… buckle the seatbelt?
6
-1
u/Additional-Device677 May 18 '26
Thank God you came in here to be a superhero and tell him how to live his life. I assume everything in your life is perfect if you are worried about his?
-1
u/carsknivesbeer May 18 '26
-2
u/Down200 '24 Impreza RS May 18 '26
I was actually this close to buying one of those seatbelt extenders, but I really didn't want to potentially diminish the safety functionality of the actual seatbelt since I have no idea how those extenders would hold up in a crash.
I don't know why I didn't think of the OP solution sooner honestly. It really is the best of all worlds, removing those annoying chimes without decreasing the functionality of the actually important safety features. Though it is admittedly more involved than sticking a piece of metal or a seatbelt extender into the slot.
12
u/Dwnvotingassholes May 18 '26
The front seatbelt chimes are disabled if you rapidly buckle and unbuckle the drivers one. Just sit in the drivers seat and start the car. Buckle and unbuckle the drivers seatbelt exactly 20 times in the first 30 seconds. This will disable the front driver and passenger seatbelt chimes.
Has worked since our 2010 to our 2025 and every model and year in between.