it has no influence on my willingness to do weekly, trip and load checks everyone should be doing
That’s the trouble. You are in a miniscule minority. Most people don’t even know that you should check the car over from time to time, much less actually do it. Since cars are designed with “most people” in mind, they need to come with stuff like this in order to attempt to keep everyone else on the road safe.
After all, if most people were competent drivers then we wouldn’t need so much investment in safety features at all, because wrecks would be very rare.
Don"t get me wrong. I am a supporter of mandating them in cars and giving people the opportunity to keep the system viable. But, they do nothing to prevent crashes in the same active way like abs or traction control does because it still requires the driver to do something else beyound the Amber light. Like, you can lead a horse to water but…yada, yada. And, even given how well they work in many cars, there are many they don’t perform well.
I like having the option that mine and many other states provide. The reasoning, at least here, is fewer people would be buying winter tires where it is necessary and maintaining them the way they should. So it’s a trade off. People who do want winter tires on rims, now have to deal with a substantial increase in cost. Yes, the headache is enough to make many change their mind. The people who want winter tires, have aready indicated by that choice alone, they are willing to go the extra mile and are much more likely to maintain them properly. Those who don’t care about winter tires here are less likely to care about anything, including responding to an amber light.
One question; , has it really changed the way you or anyone else checks their tires ? Because, if the answer is yes and if you check them less and depend upon that amble light that does not respond until a tires looses 5 lbs, you are worse, not better off. I like the rotational indirect TPMS, systems. They are good enough as an intermediate check till something better comes along…
has it really changed the way you or anyone else checks their tires ?
Yes it has. Mine displays the individual tire pressures on a readout in the instrument cluster. I have checked its accuracy with a known-good pressure gauge - it’s dead on.
So, basically I now check my tire pressures just about every time I drive the car.
And by the same token, I’d be in your camp if I didn’t have the exact air pressure displays. But I dislike idiot lights of all sorts. I still think it’s dumb that it’s hard to find a car that has an actual oil pressure gauge.
Some Of The Cars In Our Family “Fleet” Have TPMSs That Use ABS/Wheel Speed And Indicate Only “Low Tire Pressure” (No Indication Which Tire) And Some Of Our Cars, Using In-Tire Sensors, Display Pressure And Location For Each Tire. However . . .
As has been pointed out, the ABS/Wheel Speed type don’t indicate a problem when all tires are low as happens in our climate every fall when winter temperatures arrive and tires haven’t been maintained.
The In-The-Tire-Sensor types rely on a person (tire tech or owner/driver) telling the car the location of each tire on the vehicle whenever tire position changes as when rotating or renewing tires.
Also, many cars have the %$#@ warning taped over because of the cost to maintain it when batteries expire.
Having used both systems for years, I prefer the ABS/Wheel Speed type. Whenever I receive an alert I service all tires. Many drivers with the In-Tire-Sensors probably don’t understand why a tire that is indicated as low pressure, isn’t, because of a failure to reset the system when tires were moved. Tire shops and car repair shops often charge extra to reset it.
Also, it reminds drivers to visually inspect tires and mechanically check pressures and costs next to nothing for a manufacturer to install and for a driver to maintain.
KISS. Keep It Simple Stupid. I won’t even mention the brilliant Government experts on this one.
The In-The-Tire-Sensor types rely on a person (tire tech or owner/driver) telling the car the location of each tire on the vehicle whenever tire position changes as when rotating or renewing tires.
Not always. On mine you just drive it a few feet and it re-syncs and figures out what’s where. I haven’t looked into how it does that, but I suspect there’s a receiver at each wheel, and the transmitter broadcast is weak enough that only the sensor at its location can pick it up (this would also explain why the batteries have yet to die after 8 years). Or witchcraft. It could be witchcraft.
Well, I do know that each sensor has a unique ID. When you install new sensors, you can write down their IDs because if you want, they can be programmed by a scan tool.
But the alternate sensor re-learn procedure is to drive above 15mph for more than 40 seconds, and the vehicle automatically programs itself. This is from the factory service manual, so it’s not a matter of luck that mine has worked this way.
The only way I can think of to pull this off would be to have a separate receiver at each wheel. You could set the wheel sensor to record the strongest sensor as “its” TPMS transmitter, but you’d run into problems if you did it that way – if one transmitter died, then the next strongest signal would get recorded, at which point you’d have an inaccurate readout at best, and at worst you might crash the computer if it can’t handle 2 wheels with the same sensor ID.
So the better way to do it would be to make an absurdly weak transmitter that can only broadcast a few inches - just far enough for the sensor at that corner to pick it up. Making it ridiculously weak also has the advantage of using next to no battery power, which is nice. I’m frankly very impressed that my sensors have gone 8 years and a little more than 90k miles without dying, and that’s in a state where they get exposed to temperatures ranging from -20’s to over 100.
If you really wanted to get fancy I bet you could come up with some sort of kinetic charging system such that the battery gets recharged when the wheel turns, but if they last this long I don’t know why you’d bother going to the expense.
Another way to do it would be with RFID chips embedded in the in-wheel pressure sensor, but if they did it that way you would never have to replace the batteries because the sensors wouldn’t have them.
Interesting. I did Know That One Can Program With A Certain Scan Tool, But Wasn’t Aware It Used IDs. On My Cars I Have To Follow A Procedure That Starts At Right Front And Continues Around The Car, Clockwise, And Involves Changing Pressures Until Horn Honks, A PITA to me.
CSA
