Awareness is important. If you’re in a dangerous situation, it pays to regularly check your surroundings. Even in general life, it’s good to check up on things. Are you running out of milk? Did you leave the oven on? Is there a serial killer hiding in the back seat of your car?
The problem is, we can’t actively check things all the time. While it’s normally better and more reliable to actively look for something or search for it, it just isn’t practical to do it every hour of the day. So we need to rely on our passive perception to do things for us – to pick up when something’s off. It’s that passive awareness we use to tell when the milk bottle’s almost empty, or the light from the oven is still going, or you hear someone breathing when you open your car late at night.
So while you can actively check your tyre pressure every so often, it’s impractical to constantly measure the air in your tyres. But here’s the issue: unless you have a tyre pressure monitoring system, you have no way of passively checking when you’re running out of air. The changes in tyre pressure aren’t detectable to human senses, so by the time you notice that your tyres are a little flat, you’ll have been driving on underinflated tyres for far too long – a situation that leads to increased tyre wear and more dangerous, longer stopping distances.
On the other hand, with a TPMS, you have a perfect passive awareness of your tyre pressure, because the tyre sensors are automatically gauging it for you. So instead of relying on fallible human perception, you’re bolstered by the power of technology, which enables you to always know when your tyres need a bit more air.