TPMS disabling

[archerystud]

Has anyone heard of disabling the TPMS yet?

This has to be one of the dumbest laws ever passed. So my wife's Fusion has alloy wheels and in a MN climate the low pressure light is coming on about once a month. And before you bash Ford too much my Mom's Monte SS has the same problem.

So if the sensor's are just going to constantly go off and people begin to ignore them, then what good are they doing?

[Scott K]

There really is no way to disable it. If the light is coming on because the pressure is low, then it is doing its job, and having you ck the tires and add if it is low. If tire pressure is ok, then there maybe a problem with it.

[Jeremy airjer W]

Agreed!

And people are ignoring them, Which is just as dumb. It's telling you when you need to add air to your tires. Properly inflated tires have many benefits (and you can't tell by looking or kicking or whatever other ritual you use). Its nice to now that if you pick up a nail and the tire is going flat you have a warning to tell you instead of just flying down the freeway at 70 until the tire disintegrates. How many times have you seen that on the side of the highway?

My first Tundra had them. The light came on with the cold temps as it should. I inflated all the tires including the spare and reset the light. About a week later the light came on again. I checked and adjusted pressure again and thought the same as you did. A couple days went by and the light was on again. At this point I was thinking that these are worthless if I have to keep this up every other day. Sure enough I had a nail in a tire and it was doing what it was supposed to do. Thinking that the truck hadn't even saw its first oil change there was no way something could be wrong, boy was I wrong!! After that it is no doubt just as important as other safety features of your vehicle.

[archerystud]

The problem is that they need to put a much higher tolerance in the sensor's. If they had higher tolerances people would pay closer attention to them instead of when the go off all the time.

I agree with your nail in the tire scenario. If the tolerances were set higher it would take just a little more time to go off before you were notified but not enough to wreck the tire itself.

[Jeremy airjer W]

Here's some interest info for you.

On average when tire pressure is 3psi below specification tire life is reduced by 10% and fuel consumption increases by 1%.

The TREAD act requires at minimum that the TPMS lamp must illuminate within 20 minutes if 1 or more tires is 25% or more below the manufacturers recommended cold inflation pressure.

If the manufacturer recommends a cold tire inflation of 32 psi, 25% of that is 8 psi.

8 psi is pretty lenient IMO. Manufacturers get to decide if they use the 25% or if they use less but they have to use a minimum of 25% as a standard.

[crothmeier]

hey, it could be worse, you could have complete tpms failure mulitple times like me. i've replaced all 4, and have another one thats been bad for 4 months now. PITA