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Nitrogen: A Noble Gas?

As you can see, there are days when you just have to get your car off the ground and this was one of those days as the Altima was due for a tire rotation. My buddies up at Tire Town have taught me well and I religiously rotate my tires every 6000 miles, no longer than that, and it really seems to have worked as I'm usually getting in the neighborhood of 45,000 miles out of a set of tires.

We put a lot of miles on our vehicles. The 2001 Altima currently has 135,000 miles on it so preventive maintenance is something I believe in.

This year there's a new addition to the equipment in the garage and they have installed a system for filling tires with nitrogen. It's a clever machine in that it filters the air to collect the nitrogen it uses, so there are no compressed gas cylinders to be delivered or tanks to have filled up. Nitrogen makes up about 78.1% of the atmoshphere by volume, so there's plenty of it to go around. One of the reasons they installed the system was because of the consumer interest that was generated by the claims being made about using nitrogen in your tires.

Get Nitrogen Institute:

According to the

"Nitrogen in tires is becoming a popular replacement for standard air. Nitrogen is all around us... the air we breathe is 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen and the rest is small amounts of other gasses. When it comes to tire inflation, nitrogen has many advantages over oxygen. With nitrogen tire inflation, improvements can be noted in a vehicle's handling, fuel efficiency and tire life through better tire pressure retention, improved fuel economy and cooler running tire temperatures"

Now the first thing I note in that quote is "nitrogen has many advantages over oxygen". That is no doubt true, but the nitrogen is being used in place of air, not oxygen. But semantics aside, we decided to conduct a long term test of nitrogen inflation using my vehicles since I take care of them, track mileage on a regular basis, and tend to notice when things might be changing on me. We started with my Versa at the first tire rotation at 6000 miles. We also filled up my mountain bike tires. And the Altima was done on this tire rotation. Here are my observations, point by point.

Handling - I can honestly say there's no difference that I can see or feel. Maybe I'm not sensitive enough to notice.

 

Fuel efficiency - The mileage I'm getting on my Versa over the last 7000 miles is the same as I was getting at the 6000 mile mark. 

Tire life - We're not really far enough along to judge this quite yet. And the Versa is still on the factory Continentals so I can't pin the wear rate down until I get the tires on that I usually run.

 

Cooler running tire temperatures - Only anecdotal, but on a long highway trip on a very hot day, I tried feeling the tires to check, and they did feel less hot, but that was just an impression, not a measurement.

Better tire pressure retention - This one I'm going to agree with. The bicycle has retained its tire pressure far better than it ever has using regular air. It's very obvious that this is the case. I think this is the key to the handling, fuel efficiency, and tire life claims. Nitrogen molecules have a larger effective diameter than oxygen molecules and diffuse through porous materials (like tire rubber) more slowly. Therefore the tires lose pressure at a slower rate, so those folks who don't pay attention to things and normally wind up letting their tires run at too low a pressure, see less of a reduction in mileage and tire life, and properly inflated tires will handle better than under-inflated ones. Less of a loss is a gain... sort of. I'm not seeing a gain, but then again, I pay attention to what's going on with my vehicles.

I've also heard that because nitrogen retains less moisture and the oxygen has been eliminated, there's less corrosion and oxidation going on inside the tire over time, which could be a long term savings on fleet vehicle maintenance for example.

Overall, I don't think nitrogen is the panacea that some seem to think it is, but I certainly don't see any negatives to it either. All those little gains spread across the entire driving population might add up to a chunk of change and maybe a couple of fewer accidents caused by tire issues over time. Not a bad thing, and it keeps the economy chugging along as well!