I believe Ford started installing them in FEHs built after October of 2005, about the last 1/2 of the 2006 build. I'm not going to quote the Congressional Record for you, but I think they are a requirement of the Transportation Recall Efficiency, Accountability and Documentation (TREAD) Act.
That act says that a tire pressure monitoring system is mandatory, right? But does it say there must be sensors in the tires? Most of the mainstream TPM systems work from info from the ABS. If there is a 6 miles per hour difference in wheel speed between any two wheels, it illuminates the light. You can tell usually if you have sensors or not because the sensors are built into the valve stem and the valve stems will be aluminum. Mine are rubber.
I believe the ford sensors are not mounted to the valves rather they are "wrapped" around the wheel itself inside the tire.
That is possible. That's how the aftermarket sensors are. I highly doubt it though. If they are, they could have given indiviual readouts of tire pressure on the message center. That's why I was wondering if the ones with Nav have that on the screen. But I guess until I or someone else here gets a tire off a wheel, we won't know if they have sensors or not.
In the manual there is a picture of the TPS devices for the '06. It is clearly strapped to the inside of the rim and not part of the valve stem. As to how to tell if you have them. Its pretty simple. Watch your dashboard when you start the vehicle. If its equipped with TPS there will be a symbol in the upper left that looks like a tire cross section with an exclamation point in the middle of it. It will light up yellow for just a second and then go out. If you don't have the light... you won't have the sensors.
Duh. I looked in the manual and there it was. I didn't realize they showed that in there. They DO have them strapped to the wheels like the first aftermarket kits that we had at Goodyear when I worked there seven years ago. GM and Nissan have the sensors incorporated with the valvestem. I assumed they were all like that now. Thanks for enlightening me. That's cool. When I saw the rubber valve stems, I just assume we had the TPMS that worked off of wheel speed. The actual sensors inside the wheel TPMS are more accurate.
So in order to add TPMS to a 06 FEH, one just has to add the sensors, and change something in the firmware of the computer?
The FEH we use at work has TPMS, which I imagine is standard on the Fleet Model, however all I see is the light on the dash, nothing on the actual nav screen.
Tire Pressure Monitoring System
