Good question. I don’t know. But I’ll find out. Car tag renews this November, so I have at least until then to sort out this on-again off-again issue.
EDIT: Just checked, this is the last year by car age that an official inspection is not required and the mileage is also below that requiring inspection to renew the tags. Since I plan to get the two year length renewal, the TPMS is not an issue for renewing the car license tag.
Also, I hope to replace all four tires before winter and it costs less labor for sensor replacement to do that at the same time.
Looking back if the diagnostics pin pointed the problem to a particular sensor, I guess it would be worthwhile to replace that one. I see no reason to replace them all. My Pontiac identifies which sensor is the problem and I have replaced several but other remain original.
Personally, I would just wait until I needed 4 new tires and replace all of them. You obviously know how to use a pressure gauge, so just check the pressures regularly.
My guess for the cause is the same as @Bing’s above, the battery in one or more of the sensors is almost completely drained. If I had that problem I’d just check my tire pressures w/a gauge, and replace all the sensors and their batteries the next time I needed new tires.
If you want to do an experiment, you could keep track of the conditions when it fails: Ambient temperature, number of trip miles driven & avg trip speed.
Please do yourself a favor and ask the shop ahead of time “Do you have the tools and knowledge to program TPMS sensors for a 2014 Toyota Camry” . . . ?!
As I said before, some shops are surprisingly still not equipped to program sensors for Toyotas
Sure, installing sensors is easy . . . but you have to have a brain in your head to know how to register them to the car, and it’s a little more involved on a Toyota, versus Ford and GM, for instance
