Well today I had a puncture, I saw the tyre looked a bit low on pressure and I glanced on a screw in the middle of the tyre. I said ok no biggie I will get that sorted at my local tyre repair shop. However I had no warning on the dash so I thought I caught it early and it didn’t register. But to my surprise when the chap was fitting the tyre he showed me that there was no TPMS sensors on the wheel so he fitted a standard valve…
Now I own the car for about a month, and I had the wheels powder coated a few weeks ago. The shop have not mentioned anything to me about having/not having TPMS sensors on the wheels. I was with the impression all NC’s had them because there’s no spare tyre…?
right… so I guess it was an option? seems a bit weird tbh
If you get the puncture while driving its very easy to run the tyre until flat and damage both the tyre and the wheel. And no amount of goo will fix that
Also, a lot of the cheaper TPMS systems don’t use sensors, they use the wheel speed sensors to compare if the wheel is travelling at a speed out of sync with the others, and / or out of sync from a stored baseline etc
When It looks like I got the wrong impression because I went through the manual and read about the TPMS, and with no spare tyre I assumed this having them on the vehicle was the logical explanation.
Even my ND1 doesn’t have tyre pressure sensors, TPMS is done via the ABS wheel speed sensors and is prone to crying wolf on long journeys as the tyres heat up…
With some cars it can even do so when the tyres are different makes but with identical dimensions, ie circumference and rolling radius.
It seems the “Rolling Resistance” is also significant.
My old Vectra B flagged up the AirBag/ABS warning light after about ten minutes on the motorway when running on the spare; it was a different make from the other three. All four were very low mileage and with lots of tread.
I replaced the punctured tyre (and that spare) with tyres to match the other three and the warning light stayed off.
