It’s tough to know the exact amount of pressure to apply. Whether you’re a chemist who’s dealing with a finicky reaction, or a parent who wants their child to achieve their best but doesn’t want to overwork them, it can be tough to know when you’re leaning too hard and when you’re not leaning hard enough. And even if you somehow figure out that magical balance, staying there is another matter entirely. Humans are reactive creatures – we might respond to something and suddenly be exerting too much pressure or too little. That’s why it can be a good idea to take the human element out of balancing pressure.
Enter the tyre pressure monitoring system. This neat piece of technology means that you don’t have to try to judge your tyre pressure by how you feel when you’re driving or how your tyres look when you squint at them, weighing up whether you really need to check the pressure properly and maybe pump them back up, or whether you can wait another week. The TPMS does all the calculating and judging for you, and will alert you with an alarm if your tyre pressure falls outside the range you want. Then, since you’ve been notified by the system, you can confidently let some air out or increase the pressure without all the self-doubt that’s been associated with it in the past.
I’m not saying that technology will replace us in every situation – even with the rise of self-driving cars, parenting isn’t something I’m willing to give over to the machines just yet. But an automated tyre sensor saves me a lot of trouble, and I think that it makes my driving safer and more reliable to outsource this little task to the system. It just makes life easier.