A mammoth undertaking

I was on my way home on the first day of the equipment trial, when half way up the steep hill my Mini made a loud “Bong!” and a warning light lit up on the dashboard. Oh great, the tyre pressure sensor had alerted, and I had a flat tyre. I managed to limp home but there was very little I could do about it at that point – I was working long hours on the equipment trial and had no time to get a new tyre. Fortunately I have my sister’s old car for just such emergencies, and so I used that until the end of the Financial Year when I finally had the time to attend to the issue.

I checked the tyres over the weekend and the two back ones were indeed significantly under pressure. Fortunately, I have an electric pump that plugs into the cigarette lighter socket and so I was able to pump them back up again. It looked much more like a slow puncture than a catastrophic failure. But, rather oddly, the tyre pressure sensor wouldn’t reset, and still loudly bonged saying there was a problem.

The rear tyres were still losing pressure at a slow but unacceptable rate, so I took a day off on Tuesday and took the car along to the local tyre company for them to have a look, with the tyre pressure warning light flashing on the dashboard the whole way there. They must have seen me coming, as they almost immediately diagnosed two nearly-perished tyres and prescribed two new ones. To be fair though, at the last MOT I’d had an advisory notice about the rear tyres, so I knew that they would need replacing some time this year. But even with two new tyres, and all four correctly inflated to the factory standard, the light wouldn’t go off on the dashboard.

So this morning I took the car along to the garage for Mike the Mechanic to have a look at it. Apparently, it’s an MOT failure now, if you have a faulty warning light on the dashboard. I didn’t know that, but it’s considered to be a safety issue. So even though I’ve never had a tyre pressure sensor on any of my previous cars, simply disconnecting it was not an option. It had to be fixed.

In the end, it turned out to be a faulty connection to the reset button. I knew the electrics on my Mini were dodgy – the passenger window won’t open, and its locked me out before now when I’ve been de-icing the windows. This is another example of the same dodgy wiring. And it seems I’m not alone – I was moaning to my friend Fiona last night about it. She also has a Mini, and she too has problems with dodgy wiring on the tyres pressure sensor circuit, leading to incorrect alerts. Clearly it’s something I’ll have to keep an eye out for.