If your car seems to be running smoothly, you can get by with checking your tire pressure. Tires lose about one PSI every month after filling them, so checking every month can help to ensure that they are always inflated to the proper pressure.
It is recommended to check tire pressure weekly, though, as well as before any long road trip to ensure that your tires are properly filled. To know how many pounds per square inch (psi) of air your tires should be, you can look in two places: in your driver’s manual, or the chart inside you driver’s side door. A numerical value will be listed, and you can adjust most digital air pressurizers to that number.
When your tires are underinflated, they can’t perform well on the road. An estimated nearly 700 vehicle crashes are caused by underinflated tires every day. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) reports that tires under-inflated by 25% cause three times as many car accidents as correctly inflated tires.
Safety studies have shown that the presence of TPMS resulted in a 55.6% reduction in the likelihood that the vehicle would have one more severely underinflated tires (NHTSA).
Properly inflated tires save the typical passenger car 9.32 gallons of fuel, and over an entire year, TPMS saved approximately $511 million for the TPMS-equipped vehicle population (NHTSA).
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, Americans drive an average of 12,000 miles a year. With an average of 20 pounds of C02 emitted per gallon of gasoline consumed, the typical passenger car in the U.S. releases over five tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year. Driving on properly inflated tires reduces your fuel consumption and carbon footprint.
According to NHTSA: Tire wear increases by 15% every 2,9 psi / 0.2 bar the tire is under-inflated.
Notice for acceptance by the driver: Drivers do not accept pressure variations <0,3 bar
Tire Pressure Monitoring Systems (TPMS) work by different physical principles:
Direct TPMS are measuring the pressure directly, by having a wheel electronic which measures the pressure and transmits it by radio frequency (RF) from the tire to the chassis.
Indirect TPMS are measuring pressure indirectly, by using information from other vehicle- related sensors (e.g. ABS wheel speed sensor information) and evaluating these signals. Principles are: