TPMS weirdness after alignment and overinflation

TPMS has been pretty useless for me anyway. I've seen one tire get low on air and it didn't let me know until it was at 20 psi. When all 4 tires slow deflate at the same rate it has no idea you're losing tire pressure. It's just useless...I can tell something is wrong with the tires just by the way the car is driving before the light will pop up.

They reproduced the problem after about 15 miles of driving yesterday morning but wanted to keep the car overnight.

They disconnected everything from the battery and let it sit so that all of the modules could completely discharge overnight, then reconnected everything back up this morning and went out driving, so far they said it hasn't come back.

So it sounds like there was either memory corruption or a software defect where it got into a state that it could not get out of on its own without clearing the RAM.

They want to drive it some more before handing it back to me but so far it makes sense.

How or why this happened mere hours after the alignment is a mystery.

zrickety said:

It sounds like an intermittent fault or maybe the abs controller. I would try disconnecting the battery for a hard reset.

Click to expand...

I hope they cover the diagnostic charges for you.

I missed your post. Shrug.

In the end, they only charged me for one hour. I know they spent a lot more than 1hr with the car for something they probably really didn't cause (despite this being a weird coincidence). They said that warrantying this is a crap shoot given my mods/tune.

The light came on after about 3.5 days this morning. I don't plan on returning to the dealer - too much hassle for a stupid light that's not important to me.

I'm going to have my 40k oil change / tire rotation pretty soon, I'm curious to see if rotating the tires changes anything. I've had the light come on just for a simple tire rotation (albeit it was for the normal "check your tires" version of this light, not the "system fault" indicator). So I'll just see what happens then.

If that doesn't solve it, I'm going to see if I can just turn the TPMS system off in VCDS. I don't really need it but I'm still a bit weirded out by this.

It is a bit disconcerting. I didn't have a second thought turning it off. You should probably do a few hard stops to make sure the ABS is going to work though.