I am reading (and have been told) that the 2014 VW Jetta does not have a direct tire pressure monitoring system. Rather, is has an indirect tire pressure monitoring system using the ABS (anti lock breaking system.)
Would it be even possible (for less then 1000 (or so) kilobuck$ ) to have the dealer install a direct tire pressure system?
Would that even be desirable?
Or is the indirect (ABS) tire pressure monitoring system generally good enough in most situations for most drivers?
We had a 2014 Jetta and the tire pressure alert never seemed to work well. Lots of false alarms for low pressure. It wouldn’t have been worth $1000 or even $100 to correct though.
So, about how frequently would you experience a TPMS dash warning light false alarm?
If you did get a solid TPMS dash warning light, would you then test the tire pressures all around and if all were correct, would you then manually reset the TPMS dash warning light?
Every couple months? After a while I started ignoring it and now and then I’d look to see if the tires looked soft. I would manually reset when I was at a station and the pressure was okay, or after filling the tires, because the light wouldn’t turn itself off. Sometimes it came on and then went off by itself.
I can’t even imagine an ABS type system being very good. The system in our Encore is fully active and I can call up the pressures at any time, even just sitting there. As soon as you try to start the car it will tell you if a tire is low, which one it is and how low it is. Our Sorento has an older style. All it does is send a warning if any tire is low, and it does not say which one it is or what the pressure is.
ABS controlled Tire Pressure Monitoring does seem pretty primitive to me, too. To be able to call up all of the individual tire pressures on demand sure would be a nice feature to have.
In the two weeks that I have owned my 2014 VW, I have already experienced five false alarms with the ABS controlled tire pressure system in my car. I’ll see what the dealer’s service department can do (perhaps not very much?) and if these frequent false alarms continue I may become prone to ignoring them.
If the false alarms decrease to one every couple of months as had been** TSBG’s **experience, I could probably live with that, but every three days could become very annoying and potentially dangerous if I would choose to ignore them.
I wouldn’t call wheel-speed-sensing systems primitive…they’re just a cheap way to meet the federal (NHTSA) requirement that cars have tire-pressure monitoring systems. All NHTSA cares about is getting you to check your tire pressure. Individual sensors that report gage pressures go beyond the federal requirements.
One big problem with individual pressure transducers on each wheel is that they require power in order to read pressure and to send that pressure wirelessly to the car’s computer. Some TPMS sending units are powered by batteries, and I believe some use inductive coils or piezoelectric materials to generate their own power from road vibrations. This is totally doable but nontrivial and therefore not especially cheap.
Car enthusiasts don’t like dedicated TPMS transducers strapped to each wheel because that makes it hard to swap wheels for racing or winter weather or any other purpose. I mean, you can swap the wheels, but that means the TPMS system will complain because it can’t read the sensors on your winter wheels with snow tires. You can buy a second set of transducers, but they’re fairly expensive (~$200 for four wheels’ worth). Plus, they require re-pairing the car’s computer with the new transducers every time you swap wheels, often via software only available to dealers (which incurs extra expense and hassle). I just ignore my TPMS light all winter.
We had a 2011 Jetta TDi wagon, and its TPMS light wasn’t all that sensitive. I seem to recall that, after re-inflating the tires, I could hold a button down while I drove to reset the wheel speed differential the computer used as the baseline “fully-inflated” state. Obviously, your dealer will know for sure. It’s probably worth picking up a reasonably high-quality tire pressure gauge so you can measure these things yourself. The cheap ones are really cheap and not very repeatable/precise, so don’t spend the absolute minimum.
Maybe it would be useful to know that the airbag light also came on for no reason. And it would say the key battery was low, even though testing revealed it wasn’t. The dealer shrugged his shoulders.
That said, we bought another VW despite the issues. It’s primarily my wife’s car and she likes the way they drive–good performance at a reasonable price. There are also style issues for my wife, it’s not just the performance.
And FWIW the 2017 GTI doesn’t have warning light issues, but the seal on the moon roof squeals like crazy…
) to have the dealer install a direct tire pressure system?