Recently I purchased a new set of tires at Discount Tire. They wanted $240 to replace the 14 year old TPMS transmitters; one of which had a dead battery and the others which will soon expire. Over the pas 14 years, they have only detected a low tire pressure warning no more than 10 times, mostly due to reduced tire pressure form sub freezing temperatures. The local Toyota dealer quoted $550. I decided no and just disabled the TPMS warning light. I wanted them to remove the old transmitters and replace them with standard rubber valves. They refused, claiming that Federal law requires that they install TPMS transmitters. So they reinstalled the dead or soʻn to be dead ones.
I purchased $40 aftermarket TPMS transmitters on Amazon and took them to my local tire store when I purchased new tires for my Gen 3 Prius one month ago. The morning of the tire change, I used Techstream to upload the new transmitter ID numbers into the ECU. The tire store installed the new transmitters for free. I drove away from the tire store, and within 100 yards, the TPMS light went out. To me, it was worth the $40 to have a functional TPMS in the car for the next 5 to 10 years.
With our snow tires on rims I opted for conventional valves, no sensors, and just let the warning light do its thing. Every spring I swap back to all seasons with the stock rims and TPMS sensors, light goes out. When they eventually fail, life goes on. Canada has no regulations mandating TPMS by the way. In the States I believe it can mean an inspection fail, in some locations.
I've got to loo That's all well and good, with a little piece of electrical tape if it's too annoying, but the new models have a mini mutipurpose screen where this wouldn't be practical.
If it's not telling you your TPMS system is out, it telling you to watch out when you open your door, what your next turn will be, it's getting near freezing, etc, etc. It's basically the left side of the gauge cluster, or whatever the Toyota name for it is (meter something or other?).
I tend to push back a little on that conventional wisdom that when one goes the others are right around the corner. The first of my TPMS transmitters to go went 3 years and change ago (natural causes, battery conked out). Next was 2 years and change after the first (hastened to its grave by an incautious tire-machine operator). It's been another year and a bit since then, with no further attrition yet. While it's a truism that the four units have the same MTTF and were installed by the factory at the same time, it's also true that the mean is the central point of a probability distribution that can be rather wide and squat. I like to also think about whether there's a natural economy of scale to doing more at once. You wouldn't replace piston rings one piston at a time because so much disassembly work is common to them all. But changing 4 TPMS transmitters is just pretty much four times the work of changing one, so I might just do the one, unless combining it with some other reason to have all the tires off.
My other Toyota requires a dealership visit to reprogram the TPMS whenever I switch to winter wheels. I said FU Toyota I'm not paying you to change a software setting because you won't remember more than 4 tires. I don't mind driving with my TPMS light flashing all winter. Thankfully the Gen5 Prime lets me store two sets of wheels and switch between them without a dealer visit. The other miracle is the Gen5 Prime actually has an oil life reminder...the Prius V was the first car we had in the past 30 years that didn't have oil life monitoring.
