bergtom99

I own an A4 Avant Prestige which has the tire pressure sensor monitoring system. Can I mount rims/tires on my car if the rims don't come with the tire pressure monitoring system? I ask because a friend who attempted the same on another luxury car ended up with a navigation screen that would not stop signaling the problem by staying illuminated 100% of the time!

Det. Mickylaren

Someone correct me if I'm mistaken, but I believe the tire pressure monitoring system in the B8 uses the ABS sensors to measure whether all the wheels are spinning at the same speed (and therefore are inflated to the same pressure).

If so, then you can use any rims as long as they're all the same size.

johnny ro

No correction needed.

What I don't know is why.

Why does, say, Mazda use knucklehead TPMS hardware inside each wheel and Audi uses the already present ABS sensors for a dumbed-down US Consumer oriented TPMS system?

Best guess, all Audis have ABS, not all Mazdas have ABS.

Det. Mickylaren

TBH, I prefer the ABS setup for a couple reasons.

(1) I've driven a bunch of cars that do report the actual tire pressures, and I find it annoying that (more often than not) they show uneven pressures: 33, 33, 33, 34. ("Should I stop and deflate that last tire? Why aren't they even? Argh!"). I recognize that this may be the reality, but I'd rather not know if one tire is off by one PSI.

(2) It makes it easier and less expensive to replace the rims.

The main downside is that it's difficult to figure out which wheel is low when the light comes on. With that said, if the light did come on, I'd be checking all the tires anyway, so it doesn't really have a big impact on what I do in response.