More tire pressure monitor discussion.
People continue to post "China bomb" warnings but in my decades of RVing I've seen plenty of people who have also had Goodyear and other American brand tires fail. I've used TPMS for many years and since making sure all my vehicles have had them, have not had any more tire failures. They have, on a number of occasion prevented one by warning me of loss of tire pressure, usually by a picked up screw or nail. My conviction is the difference in using an RV and your normal car/truck is the secret of the TPMS preventing a failed tire. In your car/truck the overwhelming majority of your driving is less than 50 miles at a time. I believe most tire failures are due to low inflation. When you are in your daily driver and run over a nail, most likely you are going to stop somewhere before the tire loses enough air to actually blow out and the result is you just come back out from your stop to find a flat in the parking lot. With an RV, you drive many miles at a stretch and even though you check the air pressure every morning, as you pull out of the RV park you can pick up a nail and start the deflation process. The likelihood that the tire will blow out, regardless of brand, is very high if you are going to drive 200 miles non-stop to your next destination. When tires fail like this, the guilty nail usually gets flung onto the road with the shed tread and the failure gets blamed on a "cheap tire" when in reality it was the gradual loss of air from a puncture that doomed it. The tire is far too shredded to yield any clue as to what actually happened. I really think TPMS should be required for ALL vehicles, not just passenger cars (the rule now for new vehicles). Big things like Class As are very hard to control when a tire blows out and are often driven by people who have far less road time under their belt than a professional truck driver who is less likely to be taken by surprise by a blow out. Whether you have a TT or motorhome, I strongly suggest you bite the bullet and buy a TPMS. It will pay for itself the first time it lets you know a tire is losing air. You can easily get the issue fixed with a plug or a patch saving the tire rather than having it fail at speed destroying the tire and possibly causing severe vehicle damage or worse, loss of control and a wreck.
