Car horns – or at least some manner of loud noisemaker – have been around a long, long time. If we consider trains to be an early form of automobile (and, really, they are) then we’re talking 1830s or so. Even if we’re much more conservative and limit the discussion to automobiles as we know them today, we’re still talking over a century of cars with horns. And, in all that time, there have been remarkably few innovations in the Voice of the Car, with the only real recent new application of the horn –outside of its usual signal and communications role – being the honks given when locking or unlocking the car via a remote locking system. And maybe the loud, panicked honks of a car alarm. Well, at least that’s what I thought until I heard – quite belatedly – about how Nissan has re-purposed the horn for a really clever function.
There’s a lot I really like about this system I’m going to tell you about, mostly because it manages to solve a tricky and interesting problem using hardware that’s already on the car in the first place, which is one of the best solutions to a problem like this, where it requires no new equipment. I should just tell you what it is already; I’m not sure why I’m dragging this out.
It’s Nissan’s Easy-Fill Tire Alert system! Sure, the name sounds like a marketing team used to coming up with names for oven cleaners came up with it, but the system is just so damn clever I want to spit. Here, look, this is how it works:
Hot pickles, it’s so flapjacking simple and clever! I love it, I really do. This is something that actually takes a real, genuine, actually-occurs-in-reality problem and applies a clever re-use of the car’s equipment to solve it. When you’re inflating your tires, it’s an ass-pain to constantly have to stop and check the pressures. But here, the car just tells you, and it does so in an un-ignorable and wildly simple way: it honks the horn. Oh, and flashes the lights, too. And, if you over-inflate, it honks twice.
You’ll be able to know you hit the right psi even in a loud, noisy gas station, even if you’re only half-paying attention because you’re scrolling Instagram with your other hand or whatever.
Nissan made a little video that addresses just this idea by comparing their novel system to the old, crude way that we used to inflate tires, like filthy animals, and I do like how they had the other guy in the barely-disguised Honda wear a helmet, just for fun:
It’s brilliant. And yeah, this has been around since, holy crap, 2013? Man, I have been sleeping on this.
But I don’t care; a good idea is a good idea, and I feel in this age of subscription heated seats and glove boxes that open from touchscreens it’s more important than ever to call out genuinely good ideas. And, I feel like with how relatively stagnant Nissan has been for the past decade or so, this novel and clever innovation is even more worthy of recognition.
Also, the statistic shown in that video is sort of alarming:
Is this true? Or is this just a psy-op from Big Compressed Air, trying to get us to constantly inflate our tires, kind of like how the Mattress-Industrial-Complex says you need to change your mattress every 72 hours or something like that. I checked, though, and it seems to be true – an NHTSA study found that only 19% of drivers (which is about 1 out of 5) have properly inflated tires! So, really, anything that helps fix that is good.
I’m not sure how I’ve slept on this clever innovation, but I’m trying to make up for it now. And other carmakers have jumped on this as well, like Honda, who calls it Tire Fill Assist:
…though Honda’s system seems to use a dedicated beeper instead of just re-purposing the horn.
This is clever, and I’m just happy to see it. I hope it spreads to all cars! I don’t know if that means Nissan gets a bunch of licensing money, but if so, sure, why not? They can use it.
Here’s How Dirt Cheap Tire Pressure Gauges Compare To Expensive Ones: Project Farm
How To Find Out The Right Tire Air Pressure For Your Car In 30 Seconds
Why Don’t We Make Tires Like This Anymore, And Weird NASCAR Trivia: Cold Start
The Ford Transit also does this. Granted, resetting the alert on the dash is cumbersome, but once you do and you inflate the tires, the horn honks when the correct pressure is reached.
This or something like it should have been mandated when TPMS was.
With a special pox on the companies who fit TPMS because it’s required, but don’t give the car the ability to tell you WHICH tire is low.
Some of those systems don’t have direct pressure monitoring, which is often why. It uses the ABS wheel speed sensors. Which has cost advantages – not just in manufacturing, but you also don’t have a sensor to replace in the wheel which is easily damaged during a tire change.
Even if the car is using ABS speed sensing, the CAR knows which wheel is spinning at a different rpm – that’s how it knows the air pressure is low. But too many have no way to tell you which tire it is complaining about – they just have the idiot light on the dash. Which is *stupid*. One of my very few complaints about my ’17 GTI.
Minor gripe with my BMWs – the sensors report tire pressure to the car, but unless you have iDrive, there is no way to SEE that information in the car. No reason they could not have displayed it on the 2-line display in the dash. But it’s there, you can see it with an OBD scanner.
For that matter, now that every car has a screen it should be mandated to display ALL trouble codes easily.
My Volvo is the worst of both worlds – it has direct sensors in the tires that will die with time, yet the information display in the car is totally incapable of telling you the pressure or even which tire. I’m sure the car “knows“, but why Volvo decided to leave this information out is a decision I can’t understand. The car is a 2011. My previous Acura, which was a 2008 but was a 2004 design, could tell you both. Volvo went to ABS based sensors on newer cars – I guess if you’re not gonna tell me which tire or what the pressure is, may as well go with sensors that won’t die.
If your car has TPMS that shows the pressure on the screen and it updates in real-time, just leave the car running while you fill it and look in the window.
Certain late-model Jeeps have it to. My brother’s Grand Cherokee has it, and he (not an enthusiast who owns a ton of pressure gauges) loves it.