winter tires and TPMS

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Astolfo

Member
Joined
Jul 21, 2013
Messages
21
is it true that you have to take the Leaf to the dealer to rest the TPMS if you do not want the tire warning on the dash?
 
Depends.

If you put your winter tires on the same wheels with the same TPMS sensors, then no.

If you have winter tires on different wheels without TPMS sensors, then no - you'll just have to live with the warning light (which is what I currently do).

If you have winter tires on different wheels with their own set of TPMS sensors, then you'll need to re-register the sensors every time you switch between summer & winter wheels. The dealer or any tire place can do this for you.

HOWEVER, Turbo3 is working on updating the "Battery App" (for android phones) to allow you to register TPMS sensors yourself. It's not ready yet (current state) but I don't think it will be long before he has it working.

To use it, you need a bluetooth ELM327 ODB-II adapter (they're pretty cheap), an android device with bluetooth, and a tire pressure gauge. You set the four tires to specific pressures, then you drive around for 5min at ~25mph with the app running, and it will register the sensors.
 
I know this is an old thread, but I hate to see incomplete info left out there.

Most good repair shops and tire centers have CLONEABLE TPMS sensors available. A cloneable sensor is given all of the information from the original sensor. The technician puts a cloneable sensor in each new wheel and writes the information to it, so the car thinks it is seeing the original sensor. When you reinstall the original wheels and original sensors, the car does not know the difference. As far as the TPMS computer can see, the sensors are the same, and there will be no warning light or relearning. The cost with programming is about the same as a replacement OE senor is.

I personally consider it penny wise pound foolish to put the winter wheels on without the TPMS. My TPMS system has saved me from several tire disasters when the snow was deep enough to mask the flat tire feel. A friend of mine wr3ecked two tires in one winter by disabling his TPMS. And he is not a klutz or an idiot. He just could not tell the tires were flat because the snow was deep.

I have installed cloned sensors on Leafs, myself, so I know it can be done.
 
Same here for myself, don't need them, have never needed them. My wife, or children, now that's a different story.....
 
"I've been driving for 31 years without TPMS and I have never ruined a tire because it was low."

Good for you. I never have either, and I have been driving much longer than that.

Now go to any tire store and ask them how many tires come in an an average day, destroyed because someone ran them low. Or better yet, lets go back and find all of those people killed or injured for life in the Ford Explorer rollover crashes (which were mostly precipitated by low tire pressures) and ask them (or their survivors) if they think TPMS would have been a good addition to their cars. Nobody really cares if you think it is a good idea or not. It is here. It is the law. And the average driver needs it.

The typical EV driver needs it even more than the average ICE driver because us EV drivers are in the shop every six months for service--having our armature oil changed, and our blinker fluid topped-up, right? So our tires are being monitored by our mechanics. Right? Um, Not... Even ten years ago the average car was getting its tires checked ever four or six months. Now, with extended oil changes or no oil changes, how often are tires getting checked on the average car?

Another huge advantage of having TPMS is that the warning will come on before the tire pressure is critically low. This gives the driver time to plan a strategy for getting to a shop to get it repaired before the tire is damaged, or they are stuck on the side of the road.

Driving around with a warning light always ON is also a bad idea. It makes a driver less aware of other warnings which may come on. For example, in the winter, I mostly drive around in my Leaf, with my skid control OFF. The glaring orange SKID OFF warning made me miss my TPMS warning one night. I finally hit some dry road and only THEN realized I had a nearly flat tire. I was able to feel the tire was low, but it was too low to drive on. If I had noticed the warning when it came on, it would have been a much shorter walk to get to my air tank and plug kit.

Figuring out ways to defeat TPMS is not very productive. Informing people about options for making it more useful and affordable is worth it. It is fine for you to say you don't want to spend the extra monkey keeping your TPMS functional, but it is irresponsible to encourage other people to do so.

It is incumbent upon us a consumers of technology to keep asking ourselves whether we are getting a good value for our tech dollar. "Do we really need this feature?" After driving almost fifty years now, and Never Never having ruined a tire in my lifetime, I still say TPMS is one of the best ideas--best improvements to cars I have seen.
 
^^^^ +10.

All tire shops have tool for setting TPMS.
One at Costco had plug in to the OBDII and technician held handheld setting tool near each TPMS to set them.

If doing snow tires yourself, LEAF Spy Pro uses the Nissan built in approach of setting specific pressures and putting LEAF Spy Pro in index mode and driving about a mile.
Takes less than half hour.

Not any good excuse for driving without TPMS working.
 
EVOldtimer said:
It is fine for you to say you don't want to spend the extra monkey keeping your TPMS functional, but it is irresponsible to encourage other people to do so.

It is incumbent upon us a consumers of technology to keep asking ourselves whether we are getting a good value for our tech dollar. "Do we really need this feature?" After driving almost fifty years now, and Never Never having ruined a tire in my lifetime, I still say TPMS is one of the best ideas--best improvements to cars I have seen.

At first I was really pissed off at you, but then I stepped back in to my thinking brain. Then I started to think that maybe I should have done that before I posted the first time.

I never advocated for encouraging other people to do something that was unsafe or that would cause a problem for them. My post was in reaction to my frustration of "nanny state" policies. I don't like to be told that I have to spend a lot of my hard-earned money for a technology to tell me what I can notice with a simple walk-around before I drive my car. If a tire looks soft, then I'll check the pressure and do what needs to be done. (And as I think about the prior posts, it seems that a tire may have gone flat during driving in the snow, which I have to agree I wouldn't notice, either, and TPMS might save me the cost of having installed it in the first place.)

Of course, I'm the kind of guy that rebuilds the front end of a 1978 Toyota FJ40 because I like to learn how it works. I have installed power steering into the same vehicle - which means I have been working on a very critical section of the truck - how to control its direction when it is careening down the highway at speed.

But I do my research, I am careful, I check my work, and I often have someone else check my work before I'll consider it useable.

When it comes to doing something for the general population, where we might increase the cost of a car a few dollars for everyone, but save many lives in the process, I think that's worthwhile.

So, yes, I'll probably try to find ways to get around TPMS when I get snows for my Leaf. But, of course, I'll have to do research on what wheels I can use, I'll have to make sure it all fits, I'll have to decide what to do about the warning light, and so on. I'll do all that because I don't want to spend the money. But I'm glad that my brother or mother-in-law would have to pay for the TPMS because they don't know how to do all that and wouldn't know how to tell if it was safe. I'd rather they have the warning light come on and have them be alarmed and ask someone to fix it for them.
 
I think that what people are saying is that yes, Having TPMS is a great feature. What really bites is that they have made it so that only the shops are able to have the car learn the presence of new tires. Darn, we have Bluetooth crap everywhere, and we are able to pair with any device you want. Why haven't they made cars be able to recognize the signal from any tires you have on the car either automatically or be able to choose individual tires to recognize like Bluetooth? Leave it to the car makers.... :evil:
 
How did humanity make it this far without TPMS sensors?

TPMS sensors are about as useful as blind spot sensors. Have I been grateful to see the light pop up when I had a screw in my tire? I sure have but it still made my day inconvenient. Would it have been any different had I not had TPMS sensors? I easily could have discovered I had a screw in my tire far away from home but guess what. I'm human and I can figure it out. It's all an inconvenience that I'll deal with.

I agree that most of the population these days requires all of these fancy features as they are typically too busy to worry about things like their car or driving for that matter. It's an individuals decision as to whether they want or think they need these features on their vehicle. For me I'd like to keep control of my car and still be able to recognize when a tire is low or when there's someone in my blind spot without the help of a feature that will eventually lead me to lose that extra edge that makes me a more responsible driver. At the end of the day the responsibility of anything that occurs while you are driving your vehicle falls on you not on the computer or feature that is in your car.

Have a great Christmas everyone! ;)
 
pncguy said:
I've been driving for 31 years without TPMS and I have never ruined a tire because it was low.

YMMV.

ya and I know people who have been driving 32 years without wearing seat belts and they are still here too...
 
Thanks for taking my post in the spirit it was intended.

As an automotive technician, I am constantly amazed by the idiotic ideas that the car makers come up with. I had felt that way about TPMS for years, until I started seeing that it really was useful for the average person. When cloneable sensors came along, I finally felt that we had been given enough repair options that the system came of age, so to speak.

Now the big problem we have, is, how to let the manufacturers know when they have a really bad idea. Like the car that has to be hooked up to a high speed Internet connection in order to have the computer reset so it will know that you replaced the headlight bulb and it is safe to turn that circuit ON again. That is such a stupid idea I bet half of you reading this will think I am making it up! I'm not! Oh and that same car won't let you reset the light circuit if the computer serial numbers don't match anywhere in the car.

This is one of the reasons they want the digital rights act. So they can lock up your car and lock out the non-dealer repair shops. They tried to do it with OBD2, but our "interfering" federal government thought that under the Clean Air Act, they had the authority to mandate a single hardware and software interface that had to be open to everyone. It was brilliant and and it kept us able to work on cars. Without it there would be pretty much no alternatives to the dealer for anything but tires and brakes.

A Leaf example of bad design (IMHO) is the shifter. When you put a car in gear, the lever should stay in that physical location. That tells you that you have selected a specific gear and you can feel and see it is there. Because the Leafs's lever pops back into a rest position, we are dependent on the debounce software to be sure we have not moved the shifter too fast or too early. I am often finding myself trying to accelerate away in N, because I moved the shifter too fast or too early after key on. I am still having this problem after driving a Leaf since 2012 (please be nice here....).

Another Leaf bad design (shared by most manufacturers) is the smart key-push button start. I have been driving with this type of system since 2004 when it appeared in my '04 Prius. (IMHO, again) It is very easy to get out of sync with the button pushing and find yourself in ACC or even back OFF again when trying to power up. It just happened to me the other night in my '15 SL when I tried to power back up and check my charging completion times.

Compare our system to a Rogue, which I got as a rental car a few years back when my Leaf was in for software completion. (I say completion, 'cus if the manufacturers would write the software correctly the first time, us consumers would not be on the hook paying for upgrades for the rest of the life of the car.) The Rogue had the same key fob and smart capabilities, but the ignition switch was a hefty bump on the steering column, just like a key sticking out. It acted just like a key, just like all of us drivers are used to, but it was just a permanent bump. You would turn it like a key into ACC, On, and of course start is optional. All of the software recognition/authorization went on behinds the scenes, just like the push button start. The other advantage of the Rogue bump system is that it can be physically tied to a physical switch, and not a software switch. Toyota has had serious software problems that can send their cars into a redundant loop and the push button command interrupt is not seen. This would appear to be why some Toyotas have run away, causing fatalities. My Point is that if you have a physical switch which the driver can turn, you are not dependent upon software to see and interpret button pushing. (Which may sound simple, but ask any software engineer how easy switch debouncing software is.) If I had a hand in writing software standards, physical switches would be encouraged where possible in any critical safety systems. Or at least some better driver feedback than some tiny character on a dim display.

OMG So sorry for the rant.

One more thing about TPMS, about the type that has the transmitter in the wheel, like the LEAF. The transmitter in the wheel is a dumb microcontroller. It just sends out a string of data wirelessly. When we clone a sensor, we program the clone to arrange the data in the right order, and what the ID number is that it needs to spoof. All of the learning about which sensor belongs on the car, or is on which corner, is done in the TPMS controller/computer in the car (not the wheel). This is the learning that needs to be done.

How this learning is done is COMPLETELY up to the manufacturer. Some of them have tried to keep this work in house by making it necessary to use a dealer scan tool to change settings in the TPMS controller. Other manufacturers will let the controller learn an new sensor if it sees the same signal over a range of speeds. in other words, just install the sensor and drive the car till the light goes off. (Can I just say DUH now....) Can you see why we get frustrated?

So using it or not is your choice, just be informed about it and know your options and risks.

Happy motoring
 
EVOldtimer said:
"I've been driving for 31 years without TPMS and I have never ruined a tire because it was low."

Good for you. I never have either, and I have been driving much longer than that.

Now go to any tire store and ask them how many tires come in an an average day, destroyed because someone ran them low. Or better yet, lets go back and find all of those people killed or injured for life in the Ford Explorer rollover crashes (which were mostly precipitated by low tire pressures) and ask them (or their survivors) if they think TPMS would have been a good addition to their cars. Nobody really cares if you think it is a good idea or not. It is here. It is the law. And the average driver needs it..

I call it interfering with natural selection, to me it is a bad thing, stupid was meant to hurt. Problem is it does not hurt enough!
That's all I have to say about that.
 
What a great post! I have to be honest with you, I have never considered the TPMS issue because it's not an option with my two current vehicles. So, my vehicle relies on me to be mindful of it's maintenance. Before reading this thread, I would have thought this was just another "fancy" doodad that a car company wants me to spend my money on. After reading a few of the posts here, I think I changed my mind. Thanks for the thoughtful conversation!
 
So I am tempted to purchase some sensors now that they look quite a bit less expensive. My question is can any of them "clone" the existing ones so the car doesn't notice or would it still require a leafspy (which I have) swap out each tire change?
 
pncguy said:
I've been driving for 31 years without TPMS and I have never ruined a tire because it was low.

YMMV.
I've been driving for longer than that and I destroyed a fairly new tire doing 65 on I-84 in Oregon last May because I couldn't tell it was punctured until too late (it was a rear tire and the road was fairly rough). Lots of smoke and some luck that other drivers let me get safely over to the shoulder. Had a full size spare and pump so I was able to change it and be on my way.

After that experience, I've become a fan of TPMS since it never would have happened if that old car had them.
 
BrockWI said:
So I am tempted to purchase some sensors now that they look quite a bit less expensive. My question is can any of them "clone" the existing ones so the car doesn't notice or would it still require a leafspy (which I have) swap out each tire change?
Quote from their site:

A properly formatted scan tool is required to learn new sensor IDs when replacing sensors.

Any new TPMS will require scan tool to put in the correct code that the LEAF is looking for.

LEAF Spy Pro can only register tire position for TPMS sensors that have the correct code for the LEAF.
 
dgpcolorado said:
... After that experience, I've become a fan of TPMS since it never would have happened if that old car had them.
An aftermarket TPMS is an option and a good idea.

My old 1994 Taursus SHO has one.

By Johnson Controls.
Just happened to see it at Goodyear store that was installing Tire Rack tires for me.

Four sensors and replacement rearview mirror that displays pressures.

I think whole thing was under $50 but that was about fifteen years ago.
No installation cost as tire mounting cost included putting in TPMS sensor.
 
So do I understand this correctly that if I did get TPMS for my winter tires I would have to bring the car in to the dealership every spring and fall when I swap the tires? That's not going to happen, then I will just live with the warning light and check the tires like I have for 30 years...

Or is it once the Leaf "knows" the winter tires I can swap them with Leaf Spy Pro?
 
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