Changing summer/winter wheels - does TPMS make this difficult?

[James in Västerbotten]

We are barrelling through autumn in northern Sweden and approaching winter when we will be required to change to winter tyres.

My MY2019 Levorg car was sold with two sets of wheels, and last winter was spent in the city where we did just fine with Nokian studless tyres. Now we live more rurally I plan to have the wheels re-fitted at a shop with Nokian studded styres.

However, because we have space and a car lift at home, I plan to take the wheels home and change them myself nearer the time. I understand in principle how to do this, but I don't understand whether TMPS affects the process. Are the TMPS sensors inside the wheels or on on the hubs? Other than pressing reset after the wheels have been changed, is there anything I need to do?

Thanks!

 

[Arkatee]

The TPMS sensors are inside the tyre, on the ends of the valves. The shop will transfer them to the studded tyres I would think.

 

[nicodache]

TPMS sensors are affixed on the inner end of the valves, as Arkatee stated.

Sadly, the Levorg (at least my MY16) only has provision for 4 TPMS sensors in the OBD thing. Meaning whenever I swap tires from front to summer (and the other way around), I need my dealer to reprogram the car bits so I don't have warning lights on the dashboard complaining about lack of tire pressure information...

HTH,

 

[James in Västerbotten]

Ok, more complicated than I thought.

The car was a demonstrator at the dealer from August 2019 until I bought it in January 2020. It came with two sets of Subaru wheels, so perhaps there are two sets of valves and TPMS monitors in them?

 

[leftfield lenny]

Ok, more complicated than I thought.

The car was a demonstrator at the dealer from August 2019 until I bought it in January 2020. It came with two sets of Subaru wheels, so perhaps there are two sets of valves and TPMS monitors in them?

Very unlikely, it's as Nicodache said. Although my dealer told me, because I got hold of a spare alloy wheel with a tyre for my Levorg that they programmed it to accept 5 TPMS monitors. Or so they told me, I haven't had to use the spare yet to find out otherwise.

 

[ToxyRocker]

The setup you want is to have one set of wheels with with regular tpms sensors as you have now and then one set of wheels with cloned tpms sensors from the first set.
you can check what kind of sensors the dealer fitted by looking on the valve stems. If it has one ring on it it's a regular one. If it has 4 i think it's a cloneable one.
Here is an example that has one ring on it.

 

[James in Västerbotten]

Thanks everyone, especially Toxy for the photograph, which confirms what I have found out.

I made a trip into the city yesterday afternoon and chatted to a couple of tyre fitters and a mechanic at the Subaru dealer where I bought the car. Because it was an ex-demo-car he was pretty confident he remembered the set-up.

As Toxy has shown us, once the patent on the Subaru (or whoever it was) TMPS valves expired, "clones" started to appear. These are popular in the Nordic countries where drivers routinely swap two sets of entire wheels out but who didn't want to spend all winter listening to the car complaining that there were no tyre pressure readings. Since the systems don't appear to be able to be programmed for two different sets of wheels, the clones usually go in the winter wheels and impersonate the summer wheels. The clones are distinguished by three or four horizontal groves in the plastic around the plastic stem. A fitter at a franchised tyre shop showed me the clone-able valve in the photo below to explain.

I'm 75% sure this is what I have on the winter wheels. It's before sunrise right now, so I'll wait until later to go out to the barn and check out the valves on my winter wheels.

The plan now is to order some new studded tyres for home delivery - probably a set of Nokian Hakkapeliitta 9 - and then take them and the wheels to a local shop in my kommun for fitting to my existing winter wheels. I will then take them home to fit when the conditions are right.

The best price I can find is 7700SEK (€735) for a set of four Hakkapeliitta 9, delivered. The local shop will fit them to the wheels for 1600SEK (maybe I can get that down a bit).

The current winter tyres (Nokian Hakkapeliitta R2 studless) have great tread and less than 5000km of winter driving on them, so they will probably go on Blocket. Maybe I can sell them to someone like Toxy who lives in a part of southern Sweden with less brutal winters.

 

[nicodache]

I actually had no clue this existed.

But it indeed does make sense...
Anyone knows where to buy clones, and how to "program" the clone so it reports itself as genuine subaru one ?

 

[ToxyRocker]

I actually had no clue this existed.

But it indeed does make sense...
Anyone knows where to buy clones, and how to "program" the clone so it reports itself as genuine subaru one ?

Any good tyreshop should be able to fix that.