The “Service Tire System Soon” message appears when your car detects an issue with the tire pressure monitoring system.
What Is the Tire Pressure Monitoring System?
The purpose of your vehicle’s tire pressure monitoring system is pretty self-explanatory. The tire pressure monitoring system monitors what your tire pressure is, and will send you an alert if it detects that your tire pressure has gone below the manufacturer’s specifications. In the U.S., tire pressure monitoring systems have been required for all vehicles since 2006.
There are two kinds of tire pressure monitoring systems that are found in cars today: direct monitoring systems, and indirect monitoring systems.
Direct monitoring systems use a sensor integrated into the valve stem of the car’s wheels to directly monitor tire pressure in real-time. Most direct monitoring systems are battery-powered and, as a result, they have fairly limited lifespans. Some direct monitoring systems, on the other hand, use wireless power transmission, which is similar to how wireless phone chargers work.
Indirect monitoring systems, however, work by piggybacking on the sensors in your car’s ABS and ESC systems, both of which monitor your wheel speed.
The principle behind how indirect monitoring systems work is that an underinflated tire will spin slightly faster than a fully inflated one. An underinflated tire will be slightly smaller than a fully inflated one, and thus an underinflated tire has to turn more in the same amount of time to cover the same distance as a fully inflated one.
Based on this, monitoring the speed of the individual tires and determining if any of them are spinning faster than they should be enables the indirect monitoring system to figure out if the pressure in any of the tires is too low.
Direct tire pressure monitoring systems can obviously give a much more accurate reading of a car’s tire pressure than indirect systems since they measure the actual pressure of the tire and don’t generate a measurement based on relative values. However, direct monitoring systems require more maintenance and are more complex to use.
What Causes Tire Pressure Monitoring Systems to Fail?
As we’ve mentioned, direct tire pressure monitoring systems often get their power from batteries, and when the batteries die, this will cause the system to fail. However, this isn’t the only reason why these systems can stop working.
A worn-out or corroded valve stem can also cause tire pressure monitoring systems to fail, particularly in the case of early direct monitoring systems that were a part of the valve stem.
This can happen if the valve stem was repaired at any point, specifically, if the original valve core was replaced with an aftermarket brass one (valve cores for valve stems with direct tire pressure monitoring systems are usually nickel-coated to prevent this).
Some types of tire sealant apparently can also mess with the sensors in direct tire pressure monitoring systems, and render them inoperable until the sensors are properly cleaned.
The sensors may also stop working on their own, due to a fault in the transmission from the sensor to the system module. The problem may also lie with the system module itself if for some reason it’s not getting enough voltage.
How Essential Is My Tire Pressure Monitoring System?
At this point, you might be wondering whether or not it’s a big deal if your tire pressure monitoring system has stopped working. In short, tire pressure monitoring systems are certainly helpful to have, but they’re not vital to the safety or functionality of your vehicle and you can definitely get away with having a nonfunctioning tire pressure monitoring system.
Tire pressure monitoring systems can certainly be beneficial, as by keeping track of your car’s tire pressure, you can determine if your tires are underinflated. Promptly dealing with underinflated tires will help you avoid uneven tire wear and make your vehicle safer and more fuel-efficient to drive.
Of course, you can also manually check your tire pressure by using a tire pressure gauge, which will give you a quick and accurate measurement. If your tire pressure monitoring system isn’t working and you don’t really feel like getting it fixed, periodically checking your tires with a tire pressure gauge is a pretty cheap and easy alternative.
Summary
It’s not the biggest deal if you get a “Service Tire System Soon” warning, since this just means that your car is unable to keep track of your tire pressure for some reason. If you know that your tires are properly inflated, there’s no need to take immediate action, and if you’re not sure about your tire pressure, it’s easy enough to test it yourself with a tire pressure gauge.
Having a warning constantly popping up on your dashboard can be pretty annoying though, so if this warning has been bugging you for a while now, we’d recommend taking your car to a repair shop and having some tests performed on your tire pressure monitoring system.
Hi, I hope this article was helpful to you. If you've ever owned a car before, it's inevitable that you will deal with your fair share of car issues. I know I have, and that's why my passion is to research common car questions and answer them.
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