I have a 2010 Versa with nitrogen filled tires and the tire pressure light always turns on when the weather gets cold. It did it last year too and I took it to the dealership and they checked the pressure on the tire and added a little nitrogen and the light turned off and stayed off. Now mind you, I’ve driven this car cross country, no tire problems, and haven’t had any since then until the weather got cold again. What is going on? The dealership said they can reset the sensor on it but will charge me. I’m unemployed right now so I don’t have a lot of extra money and the nearest nissan dealership is six three miles away and there’s only one shop in the town that I live in that has nitrogen for car tires.
Do you ever put an actual tire pressure gauge on the tires and check the pressure.
The nitrogen thing is a bunch of bunk - especially if you were ever given the impression that you don’t need to check the pressure regularly. The tires get cold. The pressure drops. Period.
This is common…Tire pressure drops 1lb per 10 degree drop in temps.
Here’s one other bad thing about nitrogen…If you want to stay with 100% nitrogen you can’t just use a standard air pump at the gas station.
You really should NOT rely on the tire pressure light to tell you when the tire pressure is low…Get a gauge and check it periodically.
BTW…the converse is also true…when temperatures increase so does tire pressure.
Were I in your shoes, I’d quit worrying about filling tires with nitrogen. When the pressure light illuminates, check the tire pressure in all of your tires, and if one or more are low, put air in them.
Invest a few dollars in a dial type pressure gauge like these.
http://www.ghmeiser.com/dial.htm
Get into the habit of checking the tire pressure and adding air as required. Both the indirect system (ABS based, light only) on my wife’s 2006 Toyota Sienna and the sensor based system (pressure sensor in the valve stem, PSI and light) on my 2010 Cobalt require a reset after a tires are rotated or replaced.
I suggest inflating the tires to the door placard setting (I prefer 2 or 3 psi higher myself) and reset the tire pressure monitoring system (TPMS) using the directions in the Owner’s Manual. It’s better than spending a day at the car dealer for something you could do yourself in 10-15 minutes.
Good luck,
Ed B.
Along with all the other good advice above, check the tires first thing in the morning, before you drive anywhere. If you don’t have an air compressor (most don’t), keep track of how many psi each tire needs, then go to a nearby gas station and add that many psi to the appropriate tire. So if the right front tire is 5 psi low first thing in the morning, add enough air to increase the reading at the gas station by 5 psi. Then check it again next morning.
Pay money, spend time to make meaningless light go off??
Pay someone one time to make it go off FOREVER…
“spend time to make meaningless light go off”
Why’s it meaningless? These do a pretty good job of identifying tires with low pressure.
But checking the tires more frequently will stop the light blinking.
In addition to the very sensible advice to purchase a good-quality dial type gauge and to monitor and correct the actual tire pressure yourself, I want to add a suggestion that seems to have escaped everyone else:
If this car has a full-size spare tire, it is possible that there is a sensor on that tire, and that this is the one giving the low pressure signal. Spare tires are rarely checked by most people, and this exact scenario is what I deduced last year with a friend’s Rav-4. When I checked the pressure in his spare, it was down to something like 12 lbs on a very cold morning. Over the 3 years since he had bought the car, the pressure apparently dropped a little bit each year, thus leading eventually to this ridiculously low pressure in his spare.
However, if it turns out that low pressure in the spare tire is the source of the OP’s problem, that does not eliminate the necessity for the OP to check his/her actual tire pressure on a regular basis. Relying on this warning light, rather than on a tire pressure gauge is…not wise.
Yeah I blew a tire on my old chevy malibu once and went to get the spare out of the trunk and well…the spare was flat. I always remember to check the oil cars, check all the other fluids as well but I always forget about the darn spare until I have a flat, go figure. I checked the tire pressure today and the front left tire is a little low. Time to go get it taken care of!
If you don’t have a lot of extra money, why don’t you check the tires and fill them yourself instead of asking a dealer to do it?
I’m not taking it to a dealership, the nearest nissan dealership is 63 miles away, not wasting gas for that. There’s a tire place in town that I’m taking it too.
Then why don’t you get a gauge and check the tires and fill them yourself instead of taking it to the dealer OR tire shop. Unless you’re NOT physically capable…then this is the way to go…My youngest son’s Physics teacher is a paraplegic and I’ve seen him at the local gas station checking and filling his own tires. I offered to help…but he refused.
I have a tire gauge at home, I checked it the other day and the left drivers side tire is a little lower than the other 3. I know how to put air in a tire and such been doing it for years. I guess I’m just not used to a car telling me I have low pressure lol. I’m used to figuring that out for myself. My Dad has a jeep cherokee and a dodge pickup truck with the tire pressure sensors on them and he’s not to fond of those himself.
Then I don’t see the problem…You know a tire is low…so just put air in it…That will turn off the light.
yeah I was just wondering why it did it during cold weather and why the dealership would want to charge me to reset the sensor or whatever they do to make it turn off if it didn’t turn off even after they put air in it.
“I was just wondering why it did it during cold weather”
Basic physics explains the situation.
For every 10 degree drop in temperature, your tires will lose ~1lb of inflation pressure.
So–if you last checked/inflated your tires when the ambient temp was…let’s say…in the 80s, then your tires could easily have lost 5 lbs of pressure on a morning when the temp is in the 30s. This is just one more reason to inflate your tires to a couple of lbs over the car mfr’s recommended pressures.
That won’t cause a blowout?
As long as the pressure is below the max pressure listed on the sidewall (but at or above the pressure listed on the car’s pressure lable) you shouldn’t have a blowout. Most all blowouts result from excessively worn tires and UNDER-inflated tires. Underinflation causes them to overheat and fail.
It won’t cause a blow-out…Under pressure is more likely to cause a blow-out then over-pressure. Too much over-pressure and you may experience a decrease in handling…but a couple of pounds over is fine.