Check your tire pressures when you get gas, along with your oil and other fluid levels. Eyeball the tires every time you get in the car. These habits are not hard to develop and they will work even when the sensors malfunction (which is not infrequently).

All that these sensor-based systems do is train you to be an inattentive car owner.

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mindslight 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Throughout my entire life, I don't know if I have ever seen anyone measuring their tire pressure or checking their oil at a gas station. Visually assessing tires can be quite misleading as well - my TPMS indicator was just on, visually it looked like one tire (its pressure was fine), and the tire that was 10psi low looked normal.

Falling back to an attitude of not needing automation and instrumentation is a cope, and often a poor cope at that. The problem isn't the dash warning lights of the past several decades, it's the built in corporate surveillance hardware of the past single decade (and the corresponding violation of user trust in favor of corporate control).

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jeroenhd 44 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I don't see it often either, but my government has been very active trying to get people to do bi-monthly tire pressure checks at the very least.

I don't think most people know how to do it, to be honest. Partially because people seem to think reading two pages in a manual is some kind of sisyphean task that no mortal should ever be cursed with.

It's pretty crazy how little people care. Even if you don't care about the safety aspect, keeping your tires inflated well saves you a ton on fuel and tire replacements.

	▲	rkomorn 40 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Tire pressure management was one of the striking differences between my experiences in France and in the US. In France, we'd check tire pressure at gas stations on nice machines that had built in dial gauges and were free. In the US, I had to use one of those hand gauges and the air pumps needed quarters (in most cases, especially if you weren't also buying gas). In Portugal now, the gas stations also have free air and pretty good pumps.

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ghaff 25 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Checking oil at once universal full-service gas stations used to be extremely common. Think it pretty much went away in late-70s petroleum shortage in the US. With modern cars, it just doesn't make a lot of sense given any semblance of scheduled maintenance adherence.

I (again) have a low pressure warning on one tire (getting colder in the Northern Hemisphere). It looks fine but I'll get my compressor out tomorrow and make the computer happy. A lot of modern tires can look pretty good even if, as you say, they can be quite a bit below recommended limits.

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mylifeandtimes an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

maybe an age thing? When I was in high school I worked at a gas station where we would pump the gas for customers at the "full service" lane and also check their oil. The game was to upsell people an oil change. Point is, everyone saw people getting their oil checked every time they filled the tank.

And checking tire pressure was a 1x/week thing.

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everdrive an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>Falling back to an attitude of not needing automation and instrumentation is a cope, and often a poor cope at that.

A lot of modern automation is not really automation. A washing machine is automation: it takes a task which would have wasted hours of your day and reduces it down to a few minutes. A lot of modern "automation" doesn't save you any actual time time, but just saves you from being attentive:

- Checking your tire pressure doesn't take much time, but TPMS is a privacy problem and an added maintenance cost that you cannot opt out of.

- A power rear lift gate actually takes _more_ time than just shutting it with your hands.

- Power windows don't go down any more quickly than power windows. The only only benefit here is that you can open all 4 windows simultaneously. However this is a luxury, not something which saves you time. You never _need_ all 4 windows down. So maybe people like it, but it's not like the washing machine that actually saves you labor.

- etc ....

People think that needed to do or attend to anything is wasting time, but often modern automation saves no time whatsoever, and has other downsides. (privacy, maintenance cost, vehicle weight, etc.)

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elzbardico 41 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

You don’t see people checking tire pressures where you live?