Rear seat belt replacement

As the Citroen C3s get older some of the less expected parts need changing. The rear seat belt is one of those. They can get slow to recoil and the buckle gets jammed in the door shut. Damaging paintwork and causing the door to fail to shut properly.

Luckily the job of replacing the rear seat belt on a Citroen C3 is not too tricky and the later (2009) parts are quite available on ebay and fit the early models perfectly.


The biggest problem I had was that the supplied seatbelt had wound itself too tight. I just had to pop the cap off the end to reset the ratchet. This allowed me to pull the belt from the reel and I made a knot in the length of belt to stop it recoiling back again to where it was before.



Most of the job is removing plastic trim. The seatbelt is only held in by three bolts. The top bolt at the apex is possibly covered by a cap that just pulls off.

The lap fixing point is shown in the photo below. You do not need to remove the seat. Just pull enough of the cushion back to access the nut, washer and spacer.



To access the coil mechanism mounting bolt you need to remove a fair bit of plastic in the boot space. Remove everything from the boot and lift the carpet to reveal the small mounting clips at the base. These are more important during refitting.



Remove the light plastic moulding that is shown in the picture. They clips just need a good lever to release them from the metal. They do put up a bit of a fight but they are quite tough.




The black plastic moulding can now be released. Firstly remove the 4 torx screws that hold the black plastic traverse panel (the one that coves the lock latch). This traverse panel locks down the black moulding. With the traverse panel removed the clips can be released by levering up the black panel.



You will now have access to the inertia reel mounting bolt. Remove the bolt (arrowed)


Remove the light coloured cover piece that is clipped into the white moulding. Removing this will allow the seatbelt buckle and apex mounting to pass through the hole.



With the seatbelt free from the white moulding, the apex bolt and the lap bolt removed, the whole seatbelt can be removed from the car.

You can refit a replacement seatbelt in the reverse order, be careful to stop the seat belt coiling back into itself. Use a bulldog clip or a clamp to keep it from winding itself up until the bolts are in place.