Is there really a benefit to having nitrogen in car tires (for the owner) not the supplier? Claims that they hold pressure seem false and the additional cost and lack of convenient refill stations seems to me to negate any value. Please let me know your thoughts
Everything they say about it is true. The only problem is that the amount of benefits.
First air is about 78% nitrogen anyway so the max improvement would be something like 22%. When you look at the real world, the effect is likely something less than 1%. For a professional race car driver that 0.1% gain may be worth it, for the rest of the word it is just a sales gimmick.
It is a fix looking for a problem and one does not exist.This has been discussed several times before. One good thread is at:
http://community.cartalk.com/posts/list/2116762.page
Nitrogen is used in airplane tires and in some race cars. Both of those applications have requirements well beyond passenger vehicles.
Tire dealers pitch nitrogen because they can make a buck from it. If they couldn’t profit from charging you directly or use it as a lure to get you to buy a set of tires, they wouldn’t be wasting their time with it.
The nitrogen pitch also has flaws. The air we breath is 78% nitrogen. The only way to get a tire close to 100% nitrogen is to have special rims that have two valve stems (one to push the nitrogen in, and the other to purge the existing air).
For the people who say they can see and feel a difference when their tires are filled with nitrogen, ask them if their car gets better gas mileage after they vacuum it because it weights less.
Joseph Meehan worded it perfectly: “It’s a fix looking for a problem”
Save your money.
See above. No real value,
The main idea is that tires filled with nitrogen are more likely to maintain correct tire pressure which in turn means better fuel mileage which in turn means less CO2 in the air, so thats why state govs. are involved.
If people kept their tires inflated correctly there would not be a motivation for a “passive” method of doing it and there would not be requirements that shops check and adjust your tire pressures everytime you visit a shop, like there is in CA.
don’t do it.
Do each of your wheels have two valve stems? If not, and they only have one each, how are they going to get the mixed air out when they add the Nitrogen?
Wheels that are designed to run with Nitrogen have either inner tubes or two valve stems on each wheel.
Next the tire dealers will be filling them w/ helium! Imagine the fuel savings then!
I worry that folks with nitrogen in their tires will be less likey to correctly maintain their tire pressure, because they’ll only want to us ‘real’ nitrogen, which is hard to find and expensive, instead of ‘plain old air’, which is available most everywhere and is cheap.
I can’t wait for some one to start a discussion on how much fuel savings!!!
I have helium in my oversized truck tires. When I park my truck it floats about 3 inches above ground. I’m very happy with my helium filled tires most of the time, except for on windy days.
Does it make your Mack sound like a Fiat?
And at least 100,000 miles on a set of tires