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      09-16-2018, 01:48 PM   #1
champignon
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Malfunctioning Tire Pressure Monitor System with New Snow Tires

I'm off tomorrow on a trip for 4 weeks, so I elected to have a new set of mounted snow tires put on my 2018 6MT LCI M2 yesterday (Saturday) at the dealer.

I ordered the set of snow tires from Tire Rack. The tires are 245/40R18 Micehlin Alpin PA4 all around (square setup), mounted on 18x8 MSW Type 77 Rims, with Continental 433MHZ Sensors (at $33/each) installed by the Tire Rack, who also mounted and balanced the tires.

The tires arrived earlier on in the week from a Tire Rack warehouse in Nevada which is a 1-day transit time delivery. There was no evidence of any damage to the tires or wheels in transit.

When the tech brought the car back to me with the snow tires installed, he said that he had driven the car around the block to reset the TPMS system to the new tires and sensors, but that the reset process hadn't completed yet and would probably complete shortly after I drove the car further, otherwise there might be a problem with the sensor(s) in the tires.

I performed another reset and and the status monitor went up to "49%" progress in resetting but never went beyond this, then indicated a "Tire Pressure Monitoring System Malfunction." The message said I would need to check the tire pressure manually, that it was safe to drive the car, but the TPMS system was not monitoring the tire pressures. I had the 4 original summer tires inside the car and trunk so I thought that maybe there was some interference from the sensors in the dismounted tires in the car, so I drove home and removed the summer tires and piled them up in the garage. Then I drove off again and tried another reset on the TPMS system.

After removing the summer tires from the car interior and trunk, the reset never progressed beyond "0%." I have now tried this about 4 or 5 times, now on 2 different days, and the reset never goes anywhere, does not progress to even 1% from 0%, and then ends up showing a system malfunction with the above error messages.

My working hypothesis is that either the sensors mounted in these tires are incompatible with the M2 in some way (wrong frequency, who knows what), there is 1 or more bad sensors mounted in the tires, or maybe they even forgot to put the sensors in the tires in the first place even though they are listed on the invoice and I paid for them. What is surprising to me is that if there was a single bad sensor, which mathematically would seem possible, but not 4 of them, I would think that the car would tell me which tires it can read the pressure on and which it cannot? But I get nothing, just a "Tire Pressure Measuring System Malfunction."

I never had any issues with the Continental summer tires mounted on the vehicle nor was never alerted to any TPMS issues while they were mounted, which makes me doubt that the problem is with the BMW hardware, as opposed to the mounted tires I just got from the Tire Rack. The only other change is going from the staggered 19" tires to the square 18" tires, which seems to me would not effect this system at all.

Any suggestions are very much welcomed! Thanks in advance! I'll be calling Tire Rack tomorrow morning however they won't be able to do anything on this until I return from my upcoming trip, plus perhaps there is some obvious reason for this behavior which a forum reader can point out to me in this thread.
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