TPMS – Soon to become a common technology on all cars

Tyre Pressure Monitoring Systems are big news at the moment. For reasons of safety and environmental impact and following in the footsteps of legislation passed in 2008 in America, the EU states that all new cars introduced to market from 2012, and new cars sold from 2014, must have TPMS fitted as standard.

The facts

Reports conclude that global tyre under-inflation is responsible for:

• More than 20 million litres of unnecessary fuel consumption
• The dumping of more than two million tonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere
• 200 million tyres being prematurely wasted

New technology

TRW is at the forefront of TPMS technology, and our OE business has just announced its zero initiator TPMS  – its lowest cost automatic location system ever – is now in mass production and being evaluated by a number of global manufacturers to be fitted to new cars.

Like TRW’s current direct TPMS systems, the technology includes four wheel mounted sensors to directly monitor the individual tire pressure levels, but eliminates the need for the electronic initiators previously required to locate the sensor positions.

The receiver is typically mounted under the rear of the vehicle or in the rear bumper area, and can determine front and rear sensor locations by comparing the received signal strengths.

Left and right side sensor locations are determined by sensing and processing Earth’s gravitational and magnetic fields. Thus, by combining the front/rear and left/right information, the system can determine which tire is underinflated without the need for any initiators.