TPMS warning light blinks for about a minute

This problem is easy to solve if your tires are bald and it's time for a new set of tires. However, if you're a long ways from that, it's more of a hassle. I'd take it to whoever you bought your tires from and ask them to fix it. Most likely problem is a bad TPMS sensor or its battery.

 

have you tried resetting the tpms and tires pressure?

also, i read that leaving an obd plugged in can cause issues

have you cleared the code to see if it comes back?

if it comes back, you may need tech stream for sub codes. could corrosion at the ecu connector

 

The owners' manual mentions that blink pattern. It means the TPMS ECU isn't hearing from all the tire transmitters it expects, or the wrong transmitter IDs are registered, etc. If the car is old enough (a 2011 qualifies), it probably means the battery in one of the transmitters has run down. The batteries aren't replaceable, so that means replacing the transmitter.

Happened recently to one of mine (2010). I bought a new transmitter and registered its ID, and took it to my local Discount Tire and told them which corner it was, so they could dismount that tire and change the transmitter.

They didn't charge me anything for the dismount/remount/balance, maybe because I'm an existing customer buying my tires there. So I didn't bother spending more right then to replace the other three. They are probably all due to run down "near" the same time, but I often find that "near" the same time can still mean quite a spread, so I figure when the next one runs down I'll just do the same thing. If that happens really soon, maybe I'll reconsider.

 

Yeah, sometimes opening the owner's manual is worth the effort.

 

Did you change well sets or sensors recently? This is what happens when I swap my seasonal tires sets but forget to reprogram the matching sensor ID codes into the car. As Chapman already said, the blinking before steady pattern means it isn't hearing one or more of the expected sensors. Unlike certain other brands, this car will not learn the new sensor ID codes on its own.

Another problem I've had, very infrequently and still unsolved, is that the car will not hear one sensor for an extended period (10-15 minutes??), trigger this alert for a while, then suddenly does hear it (within 20 minutes of initial alert). This has happened to me only about a half dozen days over many years, not enough to fully track down the problem. When it happens, it may happen many times in a single long day. It happened on both summer and winter wheel sets in the same month, so it wasn't just a single sensor problem. An old ScanGauge-II with firmware update to read TPMS was able to isolate it to a single sensor code at a time, and confirm that the last heard signal each time showed good pressure, but I didn't record enough detail to track it through tire rotations to distinguish between a specific sensor vs a specific wheel location with poor radio reception. Now those old sensors are gone, and it hasn't yet reoccurred on the new sensors.

That TPMS reset button just resets pressure detection thresholds. If the light was blinking for 1 minute, then the car is not hearing a sensor, and using the TPMS reset button won't fix it.

 

maybe the maxitpms pad isn't working correctly

 

Or, if the maxitpms pad is working, and all four transmitters are ok, there could be a different issue with the receiver in the car.

If I remember right, the TPMS ECU in Gen 3 does participate in blink codes, so you can get its trouble codes using a jumper wire, the same way we often talk about here for brake codes, if you don't have an OBD-II scan tool that shows them.

 

Blasphemy!!!!

 

Ah. Makes me think one transmitter isn't transmitting, so the pad is picking up the working one from the nearest other corner of the car.

Could be a bit of a puzzle to figure out which one of those two corners is the dead one. Maybe let some air out of one of those tires, and if the reading changes, the dead one is the other one, and vice versa.

 

Try a search kind of like this.

 

See post #6 paragraph 2. Maybe you have a similar intermittent problem as me? How long have you driven it in a single session since this problem first appeared?

 

Is the maxipad checker showing four IDs that are all different now?

 

I think you scared it into behaving or it knew it'd lose its wheels.

 

2011 this about when the OEM TPMS batteries are expected to die.

The system (on Gen2 anyway) is a little funky. If you go in there (eg with Techstream) and reset the codes, say to 000000, this can temporarily turn off the warning lights. The system is looking for new pressure readings, and that process takes about 20-30 minutes. So until you take a longer trip, the warning light stays off. Finally after 20-30 minutes system concludes there is no update data coming in, and the warning light comes on