MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
We will be in touch
My googlfoo is letting me down on this one.....
Long story short - I bought 4 2nd hand OEM alloys for my Kia Niro EV to put winter rubber on. 3 came from 1 seller, the last came from another. 3 of the 4 came with the tyre sensors still attached. They appear to be OEM and all have an 'E' stamped on them. No idea if that's relevant or just printed for a laugh. But obviously I need another sensor for the last wheel.
Is switching wheels with sensors in just plug and play? Or does it involve some nause of relearning or coding and you are locked into a garage doing it? I'll be doing it twice a year at home - summer>winter, then winter>summer.
Is one TPMS sensor much the same as another or do you have to have specific ones for specific cars and all coded the same...or something?
Ta
I bought a spare wheel for my wife's car from a scrappy. It came with a tpm. I just put it on the car and drove for a mile or so and the car picked up the sensor. Hers is a ford though, so not sure if it'll make a difference.
My gut feel is that they are not brand or manufacturer specific. Our local tyre place (Merityre, since you asked) was able to replace the ones in our Corsa when we needed it earlier in the year. Seem to recall they were about £70 a pop. Feels like a bit over priced but at the time it felt like it was one of those things that was on the cusp of being an MOT failure. I believe it used to be but is now just flagged as an advisory.
In my old car i needed them recoded to the car.. kwikfit did it - they need to tell teh car which wheel has which sensor. It's unlikely to just start working, though I may be wrong with your particular car.
DrP
In my old car i needed them recoded to the car.. kwikfit did it - they need to tell teh car which wheel has which sensor. It's unlikely to just start working, though I may be wrong with your particular car.
Now you have me wondering - how my valve based sensor system knows when i rotate my tires ...... the little diagram in the car shows which is soft - no coding required when i rotate the wheels front to back - i make no guarantees i put them in the same place when i change from winters to summer either....
Thanks for all contributions so far...
It does seem to be a bizarre information black hole of inconsistent advice. I'd go to an actual Kia dealer...but I've very little confidence they know any better, other than you must spend many many pounds....It might be a few less pounds than if it was a German manufacturer dealer, but still many many pounds.
Off topic but interesting (well I thought so!) is that you can have a tyre pressure warning system without having special valves at all. I only found this out when my lad had tyres changed on his Skoda. The car basically calculates how fast each wheel is spinning, making of the ABS electronics apparently and so knows if a wheel is spinning too fast as it's under inflated. Very clever but it doesn't sound as accurate as actually having valves with sensors. That said, who knows how well they are calibrated after a few years of use...
To be honest that's the system I'm used to in a previous skoda and audi. These sensors are all very well but I'm not convinced many people can actually use the info they give and understand the pressure will change when the car has been driven and tyres are warm or in different weathers. All we, the average punter, needs to know is that the tyre pressure is going down rapidly so you can do something about it. With my previous cars you, changed the wheels, made sure the pressure was right, pressed a big button to reset the system and away you went. This seems a faff too far...but I guess my use case of 2 sets of wheels is a bit non normal.
This seems a faff too far...but I guess my use case of 2 sets of wheels is a bit non normal.
Two wheelsets here too, each fitted with its own set of valve-based sensors. 2014 MINI - which I think has the same system as all recent BMWs - relies on sensors inside the wheels. No coding required but the car needs a few miles of driving to register/calibrate them after swapping wheels over (which I do twice a year). I thought this was the most common setup nowadays but I might be wrong.
Also, recently one of my sensors failed - car was unable to detect a reading. Local tyre place used a device they held next to each valve to search for a signal and identified the faulty one. Replaced with a generic one there and then. Not sure how generic they are or whether there's a range of sensor types depending on car brand.
Well - by pure chance I found one on ebay that's exactly the same as the other 3, including the 'E' (found others with a 'C'). So I'm working on the theory that all 4 will fail (and I've wasted another £27) or all 4 will work!
Just going back to the note above about "understand the pressure will change when the car has been driven and tyres are warm or in different weathers". I had a 68-reg Toyota with TPMSs, and it would regularly light the 'low pressure somewhere' lamp on the dash on a cold morning. It wasnt clever enough to try and distinguish which corner. Anyway, after a few miles on the motorway, the lamp would go off, so I soon learned to just ignore it. Is that commonplace?
I had a 68-reg Toyota with TPMSs, and it would regularly light the 'low pressure somewhere' lamp on the dash on a cold morning.
It's generally recommended to add a bit more wind to your tyres in the winter months to bring your tyres back to the summer pressure. You can expect your tyres to drop about 3-4 psi when the mercury drops if you don't. I'd imagine, depending on what you had then inflated to previously, that could be enough to put them in the low pressure warning zone.
dTPMS/iTPMS
Just been in a load of meetings about this for our next gen version.
dTPMS uses direct sensing (sensors in the tyres) loads of people whine about one tyre being 1psi down and complain. Some customers try to inflate to 100 (or don't understand the difference between %/psi/bar/etc) the batteries run out, eventually. It's more accurate. Some cars you need to tell it which wheel is on which corner of the car, especially with cheap systems. Expensive ones you can calibrate the range on the receiver *right* down. Other systems might need keying to the corner.
iTPMS uses indirect based on wheelspeed, only indicates OK, less OK, bad. Sometimes has false readings if you get a bit of wheelspin early on in the drivecycle before it has enough statistics (i get this occasionally on the way out of the hamlet i'm in, steep gravel roads can be slippy). It's cheaper and works better for most customers, it's only a few dozen lines of code piggy backed on the existing ABS/TC/DSTC controller. You can use any wheel or tyre as well. (using a single odd sized tyre gives the system palpitations.
This is just a simplification... Lots of really clever nerds were telling me this stuff, and all i really needed to know is how often customers would screw it up and/or complain...
I find the Skoda indirect system fine. Never had a false actication. Activates when the tyre pressures drop by around 25%. Easy to reset. When I had a tyre which tended to lose pressure I inflated it to 10% over when I reset the warning so it would activate before going 25% below correct pressure.