A customer reinflates a tire on the 2013 Nissan Altima using the Easy-Fill system.
Nissan will offer its new Easy-Fill Tire Alert system on all new and updated models as they come to market starting next year.
The system — which will debut on the 2013 Nissan Altima when it goes on sale in the coming weeks – is designed to not only alert a motorist when a tire is underinflated but also to make it easier to fill it back up.
Federal rules already require the use of a Tire-Pressure Monitoring System, or TPMS, on all vehicles. But most makers have opted for a low-cost version that flashes a warning when one of the vehicle’s tires is low. It’s then up to the motorist to figure out which one and then re-inflate it.
More advanced TPMS technology – typically offered on higher-end vehicles – will show a driver which individual tire is underinflated. But that still requires a motorist to use a special tire gauge to ensure proper inflation, a sometimes frustrating trial-and-error process.
With the launch of the 2013 Altima, Nissan introduces a simpler system that not only tracks the precise inflation at each of a vehicle’s individual wheels but also permits a driver to fill a low or flat tire without a gauge.
(For a review of the new 2013 Nissan Altima, Click Here.)
When you connect a tire to an air pump the Easy-Fill system begins blinking the Altima’s flashers. When you reach the proper inflation the horn beeps. If a driver goes too far, the flashers blink even more quickly as air is let out of the tires. The horn will beep again when the tire is properly inflated.
“Nissan’s ‘Easy-Fill Tire Alert’ system is straight forward and eliminates the need to keep a tire gauge in your vehicle’s glove compartment,” said Pierre Loing, vice president, Product Planning, Nissan North America, Inc. “By making this unique Nissan innovation available on all our future products, the guessing and the gauge vanish for our customers.”
Along with the new Altima, the new Easy-Fill Tire Alert is going into the Nissan Leaf battery electric vehicle and the Nissan Quest minivan.
The maker plans to roll out five new models over the next 15 months, starting with Altima. Among others coming for 2013 are an all-new version of the Sentra sedan and the Pathfinder utility vehicle – the latter migrating from a conventional, truck-like platform to a more car-like unibody “architecture.” They and all new or updated Nissan models will offer the Easy-Fill system either as standard equipment or an option.
As TheDetroitBureau.com has frequently reported, keeping tires properly inflated has a number of advantages:
- Tires last significantly longer;
- Proper inflation can reduce fuel consumption by up to 3.3%, according to the Department of Energy; and
- A new federal study suggests under-inflated tires triple the risk of an accident.
“Tire problems are inherently hazardous to vehicle safety,” said the report by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which based its study on crash data covering a three-year period from 2005 to 2007.
(Those Under-Inflated Tires Could Kill You. Click Here for the full story.)