The curtain airbag is the long bag folded into the roof rail above your doors, and it is one of the easiest parts to order wrong. Here is how the assembly works, how to read the part number, and what changes between cab lengths and body styles.
The side curtain airbag is a long fabric bag folded into the roof rail above your doors, hidden behind the headliner and the pillar trim. People mix it up with the bag in the seat or the door panel. The curtain is the one that drops out of the roof. When it fires it drops straight down over the front and rear side windows on that side of the vehicle.
Two things set it off. A hard side impact is the obvious one. The other is roll sensing. A roll-rate sensor and an accelerometer watch how far and how fast the vehicle is tipping, and if the control module reads a rollover starting, it fires the curtains on both sides. A steering wheel bag vents and goes soft almost immediately. A rollover curtain is built to hold pressure for several seconds, because the job is keeping heads and shoulders inside the glass line through more than one roll.
The bag is one piece of a larger assembly. Each curtain has an inflator canister at one end, usually up near the C-pillar, a folded curtain wrapped in a sleeve, mounting tabs spaced along the rail, and a front tether that anchors near the A-pillar so the curtain cannot swing into the windshield when it drops. All of that ships together as one part.
Pop the A-pillar trim on almost any vehicle built in the last twenty years and you will see the end of it, a rolled fabric tube running back along the roof rail with a clip or a bolt every foot or so. Getting a full look means dropping the headliner. Most owners never see one until a body shop opens the car up.
The part number sits on a label glued to the sleeve or stamped into the inflator body. Toyota and Lexus call it a curtain shield airbag and split the numbers by side: 62170 prefixes the right hand assembly, 62180 the left. Ford part numbers carry a 042D94 or 042D95 block inside the full string, again split by side. GM never uses the word curtain in its catalog, it calls the part a roof rail airbag under a plain eight-digit number. Photograph the entire label, not the first block of digits. The suffix is what separates one body style from another.
LH and RH on a curtain mean the driver side and the passenger side as you sit in the seat facing forward, not the side you happen to be standing on. On a US-market vehicle, left hand is the driver side. The two sides are genuinely different parts. The inflator sits at the opposite end, the tether anchors mirror each other, and the connector faces the other way, so a left curtain will not hang right on the right rail. Rollovers fire both, which is why a rolled vehicle needs a pair. A side impact often fires only the struck side, and buying a single is a perfectly normal repair.
A deployed curtain is not subtle. The headliner edge is torn loose, pillar trim clips are broken or pushed out, and fabric is hanging down the glass. Once an inflator has burned its charge there is nothing to rebuild. The assembly gets replaced.
A curtain fault code with nothing hanging down is a different animal. Open-circuit or high-resistance codes on a curtain squib usually trace to a connector under the pillar trim left unplugged after a headliner or stereo job, or a wire chafed where the loom crosses a bracket. Run the code on our airbag code lookup before you order any hardware. And if the vehicle has already had a deployment, bolting in a fresh curtain will not turn the dash light off on its own. The crash record stays locked in the control unit until it is cleared, which is the whole point of an airbag module reset. Our explainer on what an SRS airbag module is walks through why the light follows the computer's memory instead of the bag.
Length is the big one. The curtain spans the cabin, so cab and body length change the part. A Chevrolet Silverado or GMC Sierra regular cab, double cab, and crew cab each take a different roof rail airbag, and the crew cab number will not work in the double cab even though the trucks look nearly identical outside. Ford splits SuperCab and SuperCrew F-150s the same way. A Tahoe and a Suburban share plenty of parts and do not share curtains, because the Suburban is longer behind the rear axle. Some long-wheelbase SUVs and vans add a separate rear curtain for the extended section.
Sunroof and panoramic roof cars are the second trap. A sunroof changes the headliner, the roof bow spacing, and sometimes the mounting points of the curtain itself. Two-door and four-door versions of the same model never interchange. Neither do roll-sensing and non-roll-sensing variants, which can appear in the same model year across trim levels.
One more that people miss. If the vehicle has been through a shop before, the curtain already in it may be the wrong one, fitted physically but reading out of range electrically. Compare the number on the installed part against what your VIN calls for instead of assuming the old one was correct. Search curtain airbag in our store and every one on hand is listed with the vehicle it came off.
Curtain airbags carry a live pyrotechnic inflator, which makes them regulated hazardous material. They travel by ground only, to a street address, in the lower 48 states. No air freight and no overnight, and that is federal transport law rather than a shop policy.
Installation is not a driveway job. The headliner has to drop far enough to reach the rail, pillar trim has to come off without breaking clips, and the battery needs to be disconnected long enough for the reserve capacitor in the control module to bleed down before anything gets unplugged. Afterward the system gets scanned to confirm no codes remain. Any body shop or restraint technician can handle it.
Restraint parts are final sale unless the part is not what was pictured or described, which our returns page spells out. Photograph it when it arrives, before anything comes out of the packaging. Call 501-988-0611 with your VIN and we will confirm the exact curtain your vehicle takes.
Not always. A rollover fires both sides, so a rolled vehicle needs both. A side impact usually fires only the struck side, and replacing that one curtain is a normal repair. Buy the pair when both deployed or when you want matching donor hardware, and buy the single when only one went off.
No. The inflator is a one-time pyrotechnic charge and the fabric is stretched past its folded state once it fires. There is no way to refold or recharge one safely. The airbag itself gets replaced. What can be cleared is the crash data stored in the control module, which is a separate job from the bag.
Because the light follows the module's memory, not the bag. The control unit locks itself after a deployment and holds the crash record until a technician clears it. Install the hardware, then clear the module. If the light stays on after both, pull the codes again, since an unplugged connector under the pillar trim is the usual culprit.
Count the doors and measure the cabin, then confirm with the VIN. Regular cab, extended or double cab, and crew cab all take different lengths on the same truck. The VIN decodes the body style, which is why we ask for it before confirming any curtain.
No. An undeployed airbag is regulated hazardous material and moves by ground freight only, to a physical street address. That applies everywhere in the country regardless of who is shipping it.
Other parts in the catalogue:
Driver airbag: the module in your steering wheel Passenger airbag: the module behind your dashboard Knee airbags: what they do and how to buy the right one Seat side airbags Seat belt retractors Seat belt pretensioners All part types
Our staff has handled these parts since the nineties.
Genuine OEM, tested, and shipped ground from Jacksonville, Arkansas.
Do not see it listed? Request a part or call 501-988-0611.