Thanks Government Regulations

Another happy coincidence happened today. I was taking my car in to get the oil changed when the Pressure Sensor light came on. Normally I would consider this a good, helpful thing, but not today. It came on a couple of weeks ago during our big cold snap. At the time checked all my tires and the pressure was fine in all of them, so I chalked it up to the cold & ice causing a malfunction. After about a week, it went off, just about the time the weather warmed back up. I mentioned something to my car guy when I was took Sarah’s car in for an oil change last week, and he seemed to think that it might be something with a battery that was either dead or dying. He explained to me that the sensors run off of an RF signal to the on-board computer so that if anything interrupts the signal, it will fault out and cause the error. The most common reason is from the battery that powers them needing to be replaced.

I asked him to just check it and make sure that it wasn’t actually some sort of tire problem and let me know. When he called later in the afternoon, he said that no, there was not a problem with any of the tire pressures and yes, it did look like the battery on one of the pressure sensors (I believe he said front passenger?) was shot. So I thought, OK, great, just replace the battery, thinking it was something like a little, lithium ion, watch battery or grouping of them, that powered it. Nope. There is no replacing them. Once the batteries die, you have to replace the whole sensor, which would be $100. He explained that they could probably get around it by just installing a rubber stem and I would just have to monitor the tire pressure manually, but then the light on the dash would always be lit & I would have to reset the alarm every time I started up my car, but the light would never go off. It was an “important safety feature” that the government mandated about 15 years ago (maybe a little longer) when Firestone had all the problems with tires on Explorers blowing out and causing rollover accidents. Ever since then, Good old Uncle Sam has thought it best not to rely on me to make sure my tires are inflated properly, but to require carmakers to put sensors in the rims that will do it for me. Which also means that when one wears out, I need to be on the hook for $100/each to get them replaced.
 
Yep, nothing like having the government take care of you.