New valve stem cost

Do you have TPMS (Tire Pressure Monitoring System)?

If it is, the valve stem is part of the TPMS sensor and the price seems in the ballpark.

 

Hi md...,

Well, you can call this the FORD tax. You see Ford had this real low tire pressure as standard on their Explorer tires, a tall vehicle with tall tires. Well, they sold these things to Californian desert dwellers. The extra flex in the tire side walls due to the low prescribed tire pressure and high temperatures of a typical California desert caused the sidewalls of the tires to fail typically while people were doing high speeds on higways. Then the Explorers rolled over and killed people.

Consequently, the Federal Governement main it mandatory that all road vehicles sold in the US beginning in 2006 to have a system which alerts the driver to low tire pressure. This requires a tire pressure sensor be integrated into to the valve stem. Of course, its made with low cost metal - which has galvanic potential with other low-cost metals in the valve extenders you have on your car. In Toyota vehicles this system is called the TPMS (Tire Pressure Monitoring System).

Replace them with plastic extenders. If you want bling, get the exterior of the plastic extenders plasma coated with shiny metal.

 

Correct. A new tire would not include the TPMS sensor.

 

Hi All,

A side note reqarding the TPMS sensors. Prius cars before 2006 had rubber valve stems. As you may know its law that these be replaced each time tires are replaced. Tire places tend to use low-cost rubber stems, which of late have been made in China of sub-standard rubber. This rubber tends to fail in high ozone enviorments (IE your typical metropolitan area where most of the cars are). The TPMS sensors have a metal stem, which eliminates this problem. But as with all technology, there is a double-edged sword issue.

 

I would actually call it the Firestone/Ford tax. Ford specified the tires and inflation pressure, Firestone designed and manufactured the tires that failed and delaminated. I recall from the NTHSA report that the trend of failures indicated that it wasn't a question of if the tires would fail, it was only a question of when the tires would fail with hot temps speeding up the process of separation.

I replaced mine when they were not included in the original recall, then was reimbursed by Ford a year later when they decided to extend the recall to include all sizes of the Firestone Wilderness AT.