Comment by SoftTalker 3 days ago
Check your tire pressures when you get gas, along with your oil and other fluid levels. Eyeball the tires every time you get in the car. These habits are not hard to develop and they will work even when the sensors malfunction (which is not infrequently).
All that these sensor-based systems do is train you to be an inattentive car owner.
Nonsense. Information is good.
I do have a walk around the car before I set forth, but stuff happens.
Some drives are very long -- hours and hours between stops. I've had tires that aired themselves down during a drive. TPMS can alert me to that issue before I get an opportunity to have another walk-around, so I can stop and address it before it becomes a safety concern.
It's fine if someone want to live in a world without monitoring systems; anyone is free to drive an old car with points ignition and a carb if they want (or mechanical diesel! with an air starter, even! no electricity needed at all!).
And sure, there's a certain joy to driving something of relative mechanical simplicity.
But I like modern cars. And I like things like temperature gauges, closed-loop electronic fuel injection, oil pressure indicators, ABS, traction control, backup cameras, and [I dare say] tire pressure monitoring. I like cruise control. I like headlights that turn themselves on when necessary, and off again when they're unnecessary.
And as one might correctly surmise: It doesn't have to be that way: There's other ways to live. A person can also choose to walk, ride a bike, use a horse, commit to a lifestyle that is centered around public transportation, or whatever. The world is full of options.
I've chosen my path, and you can also choose yours.
(And no, that doesn't make me inattentive. My path involves both a belt and suspenders.)
Information is good but the number of "slow leak on a long drive" failures made less inconvenient by TPMS almost certainly pales in comparison to the inconvenience of maintaining the system for the average consumer.
Acting like all this is a safety concern is just textbook internet comment section lying through ones teeth type behavior. Yes, anything can be a safety concern at the limit but even tire failures on the road to not typically elevate to that level. The following framing of "well just drive an old car if you don't like it" is more of the same sort of dishonesty with a veneer of plausible deniability on top. There's no reason these systems need to be built in a way that they can't be disabled and leak PII. There's no reason just about all the systems you're trying to frame as a "bundle" have to be bundled in the first place.
Low tire pressures are a safety problem. Low tire pressure increases the likelihood of catastrophic tire failure. People can (and do!) die from catastrophic tire failures (and from complications of them, like being run over while changing a tire on the side of the road).
I'm not acting. This is not a performative display.
But yes: While I'm happier in a world with TPMS, I'd be even happier yet in a world where it was a quick and simple job to disable it in a reversible way. (Perhaps in some manner similar to the incantations used to disable the passenger seatbelt chime in many cars.)
Nonsense. People are still driving cars without TPMS, they can feel the difference while driving and do tire pressure checkups regular intervals depending on run. No issue.
Of course. A skilled driver knows their car very well, and can note by feel that the car is pulling somewhat to one side and correctly identify that this is due to low tire pressure instead of an external effect like road condition or wind, and then decide whether to address it or keep going.
A skilled driver can notice all kinds of other stuff using their senses, too.
For instance: When there's a plume of coolant coming out of the hood in front of them, they can deduce from observation that the engine temperature may be very high. They can also identify low oil pressure by observing the clacks and bangs of an engine that is starved for oil and tearing itself apart, or even by the silence of an engine that has ceased.
Or: Information. A light can illuminate on the dashboard the before these conditions are pronounced enough to feel, and the driver may then elect to use this abundance of information to take action before it snowballs into something that may become expensive or dangerous.
Throughout my entire life, I don't know if I have ever seen anyone measuring their tire pressure or checking their oil at a gas station. Visually assessing tires can be quite misleading as well - my TPMS indicator was just on, visually it looked like one tire (its pressure was fine), and the tire that was 10psi low looked normal.
Falling back to an attitude of not needing automation and instrumentation is a cope, and often a poor cope at that. The problem isn't the dash warning lights of the past several decades, it's the built in corporate surveillance hardware of the past single decade (and the corresponding violation of user trust in favor of corporate control).
I don't see it often either, but my government has been very active trying to get people to do bi-monthly tire pressure checks at the very least.
I don't think most people know how to do it, to be honest. Partially because people seem to think reading two pages in a manual is some kind of sisyphean task that no mortal should ever be cursed with.
It's pretty crazy how little people care. Even if you don't care about the safety aspect, keeping your tires inflated well saves you a ton on fuel and tire replacements.
Tire pressure management was one of the striking differences between my experiences in France and in the US.
In France, we'd check tire pressure at gas stations on nice machines that had built in dial gauges and were free.
In the US, I had to use one of those hand gauges and the air pumps needed quarters (in most cases, especially if you weren't also buying gas).
In Portugal now, the gas stations also have free air and pretty good pumps.
> the air pumps needed quarters
I landed at JFK and was looking for a stroller to stack my suitcases on. The kind of stroller that is free in every single airport I've been to.
I was shocked to see it costs $7. The guy who (I presume) worked there sardonically exclaimed "Welcome to America."
Presumably you mean a “trolley” not a “stroller”, because strollers are for moving children not luggage
But yeah, free airport trolleys are are an easy marker of evolved civilisations, and the USA fails this test.
Countries that have passed this test for me that I can recall: Australia, Greece, Singapore, China, UK, Thailand, Italy, Spain…
Checking oil at once universal full-service gas stations used to be extremely common. Think it pretty much went away in late-70s petroleum shortage in the US. With modern cars, it just doesn't make a lot of sense given any semblance of scheduled maintenance adherence.
I (again) have a low pressure warning on one tire (getting colder in the Northern Hemisphere). It looks fine but I'll get my compressor out tomorrow and make the computer happy. A lot of modern tires can look pretty good even if, as you say, they can be quite a bit below recommended limits.
maybe an age thing? When I was in high school I worked at a gas station where we would pump the gas for customers at the "full service" lane and also check their oil. The game was to upsell people an oil change. Point is, everyone saw people getting their oil checked every time they filled the tank.
And checking tire pressure was a 1x/week thing.
My point was that this is not any sort of widespread normalized behavior in the US in the past few decades. I was responding to a comment preaching as if this was routine behavior, and that people not doing it are simply being "inattentive".
I do get that it used to be a thing in the past. But that was also when oil was rated for 3k miles (I think? maybe it was even lower) and engines would routinely burn oil (ie consume it without leaving a drip spot on the ground). Whereas in the modern day, 15k synthetic exists.
FWIW, I probably do more of my own maintenance than the median HNer. I'll admit I can let intervals slip more than I'd like and I'm working on that, but this idea that everyone is checking fluid levels all the time just seems wildly off base.
>Falling back to an attitude of not needing automation and instrumentation is a cope, and often a poor cope at that.
A lot of modern automation is not really automation. A washing machine is automation: it takes a task which would have wasted hours of your day and reduces it down to a few minutes. A lot of modern "automation" doesn't save you any actual time time, but just saves you from being attentive:
- Checking your tire pressure doesn't take much time, but TPMS is a privacy problem and an added maintenance cost that you cannot opt out of.
- A power rear lift gate actually takes _more_ time than just shutting it with your hands.
- Power windows don't go down any more quickly than power windows. The only only benefit here is that you can open all 4 windows simultaneously. However this is a luxury, not something which saves you time. You never _need_ all 4 windows down. So maybe people like it, but it's not like the washing machine that actually saves you labor.
- etc ....
People think that needed to do or attend to anything is wasting time, but often modern automation saves no time whatsoever, and has other downsides. (privacy, maintenance cost, vehicle weight, etc.)
As someone who grew up in the pre-power-window 1970s and 80s, they absolutely do save time. You have to remember that manual crank windows went along with a lack of air conditioning. Being able to quickly roll down the windows (especially all four at once) in a hot car mattered.
It takes real time to get out a pressure gauge and check the pressure on each wheel, no? Furthermore, attention itself is a limited resource.
For example, power windows were always handy when getting on/off the highway and coming up to a toll booth where I'd have to give/take a ticket. It's much easier to hold a button (or even have a latching button) while spending my attention on actually driving.
I have one car with TPMS that's entirely done through the ABS controller measuring the relative diameters of the wheels. That's not a privacy or cost problem. Furthermore the privacy problem where wireless TPMS sensors are interrogatable is better framed as a security vulnerability in their design, rather than something intrinsic.
Weight is a red herring as I'd guess the fuel savings from having properly inflated tires outweighs the fuel spent on the extra mass.
You don’t see people checking tire pressures where you live?
All these low profile tires do make it a lot harder to eyeball your tires to an acceptable level and tell if they are low. But low profile tires are just in general kind of crappy already.