Service (SVC) Tire Monitor System Warning – What Does it Mean? What to do?

The Tire Monitor System (TMS) is part of your Silverado’s monitoring systems. It’s job is to watch your tires’ pressure and report if it goes too high or too low. Most of the time, it is reporting on the low tire pressure condition because that’s the one most of us find ourselves in.

There are times, though, when your tires are way above the manufacturer’s recommendations — let’s say you are filling your tires up and you have no tire service gauge available. In this condition, it’s pretty easy to let the air flow into the tire for too long so that you end up way over the recommendations. Since, this is the case, you will find the TMS will react and notify you of the problem. Further, it might suggest that you simply release some of the air from the each tire to restore your vehicle to balance in all four wheels.

If your tires have too much air pressure in them, you can easily damage them. Not only does the added pressure cause a harsher ride for you and your passengers, but it also makes the tires harder so that impacts to things like potholes or road-surface irregularities. In turn, you can damage the tire quite easily. Further, it is possible that you can quickly burst a tire and break a wheel, as well. Alloy wheels don’t like this type of damage so you can quickly knock a piece or pieces out of an expensive wheel, leaving you with quite a repair bill (some special service wheels can cost up to $2,000 and the tires that surround them can easily add another $1,500 or more for the rubber, so if you damage one wheel and tire, you are out $3,500; two is $7,000 and so on).

Most of the time, as noted, the TMS tells you the wheel’s or wheels’ that may be under-pressured. The TMS usually notifies you when you tires are about four to seven pounds underneath the proper pressure for your car. The system then continually reminds you that a tire or tires is has pressure that is too low. Unless there is some kind of alarm, then the system sits there continually showing a warned condition.

In order to find out which tire is too low — usually the condition it reports the most, other than normal — you have to go from tire to tire and either check the air pressure in the tire with a hand gauge to see which tire or tires are low. Then, you simply have to refill the offending tire or tires and you are on your way.

At one time, the Tire Monitor Service was part of the standard equipment on really high-end cars that marked the top-of-the-line. In the Chevy world, then, you would have found it on the Corvette, the 3LT versions of Chevy Suburbans, the Chevrolet SS and similar vehicles.

Now, monitoring systems are found on just about every vehicle on the market. It is a way you can know that your car’s tires are in good shape and working for you.

That’s all there is to it.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 4 months ago by alex00.