I’ve gone both ways, and it depends on the sophistication of the TPMS system involved and your storage situation.
On my daughter’s 2018 RAV4, I cloned her set of winter tires. When she lived at home, her car was parked outside in the driveway and I stored the unused tire in the attic above my garage. I have an electric winch in the attic for lifting tires. The car and the tires were slightly apart. No issues and seamless seasonal changes.
Through some professional forums, I am aware that some vehicle systems have a dual capability. Similar to how the handheld TS508 sends a ‘query’ to sensors, some vehicles can also ping their sensors in some circumstances in the 175 KHz band. I don’t know if Subaru uses this feature, but looking at the TPMS developer kit for some of the chips used, it is an option.
I also read about a Toyota owner who was getting false lights in his garage for several days. I suggested he roll his stack of clone tires into the back yard and report back. Of course, with the tires out of the garage, the problem stopped. He put them back in and the issue was reversed. He bled the stack with low pressure and the problem stopped. So apparently the stack was periodically waking up and transmitting low pressure! Not really a big deal, except that sleep sensors don’t use battery power and hibernating will result in reduced service life.
So for this reason when I put the latest set of winter tires on my 2018 Forester I programmed a new set of Autel MX1 sensors with a different set of codes and it only took 5 minutes to connect and register (upload) replacement group twice a year.
