Usain, like most modern vehicles, has rear sensors that sound a warning when reversing the vehicle and it detects something is in the way. Since we typically travel with a bike rack attached to the hitch, it gets really annoying to have to reach up to the dash to turn off the annoying beeeeeep each time we have to back up since it resets itself each drive. If we ignore the warning too long and continue to back up, then the auto-brake kicks in and creates one heck of a jerk, which is even worse than the beep.

Disabling the reverse sensors is a mod that I’ve wanted to do for a long time, but the directions I found online were always unclear as they didn’t match our particular Sprinter model. Therefore, I just kept putting it off. Everything I’ve read said that disabling the sensors only affects reverse and won’t impact any of the other parking sensors, so I decided to give it another try and it was way easier than I thought it would be.

From what I read online (and YouTube videos like this one) is that all I needed to do was lay on my back under the rear bumper, pull out the sensors, detach them, stick them back in, and then tape up the wires. When I reach under our Boldt’s bumper, I found that I can barely touch the back of the sensors, let alone pull them out. It appears that the rear bumper on the Boldt would need to be removed to actually get to the sensors. After feeling around, I found a couple of wire connectors zip tied up in the chasis above the bumper, and with a 50/50 chance I unhooked the smaller one and tried it out. Nope, the display on the dash said that the blind side sensors were disabled. I put the first connector back together and tried the larger one. Yep, that did the trick. I then took the van over to an empty parking lot and gave it a good workout. When I first place it into reverse now, there is only a short beep and the auto-brake never kicks in. Yay! Other than the short beep, the reverse display shows a red “U” showing the sensors are disabled (see picture below).

One note if you try this yourself. The wire connector is a proprietary Mercedes Benz electrical connector. To unhook it, you need to use a small flathead screwdriver to push up (in the direction of the wire) the white tab a couple of millimeters until it clicks. Then press the white tab in (perpendicular to the wire like a button) and pull the two pieces of the connector apart. After disconnecting, I wrapped the 2 ends with electrical tape to keep them clean and then zip tied them back up where they were.