Potentially an ignorant question, but here goes: I recently bought winter wheels/tires. When I took off the stock wheels, I noticed that they didn't want to stand straight on their own, as the tire wear was slightly uneven. Is this normal for the G? The stock (and new) wheels track straight and true -- no problems at all, no pulling, etc.

Every wheel is consistently the same - front and rear, both sides. They all want to fall to the "inside", or to the unfinished side of the wheel that would normally face the car. Looking at the tire tread itself, there doesn't seem to be an unusual wear pattern. The car only has 5,600 miles on it, so this happened rather quickly.

I assume this is related to the stock suspension/alignment setting on our cars, but thought it would be worth asking.

 

Do you have a sport or non sport? Also, what size tires/wheels do you have? Do you notice a discrepancy in real speed vs actual speed?

 

I have the S with staggered stock wheels. ?? on question two, as I'm asking about the stock wheels that aren't on the car right now.

 

I don't think tires ever wear out perfectly even but yes, this can either be caused by missalighnment or wrong tire preasure. If you drive around at 30psi or less, your tpms may or may not light up but tires will get eaten out on the outtsides. You gotta look at the wear pattern to figure out what if anything is wrong with yours. Then again i would not expect perfectly straight and even wer in any car.

 

Sorry, I'm confused. Is there a significant wear pattern issue or not?

Typically wheels fall on the outside face because that's where all of the weight is especially on negative offset wheels like ours. I don't know that I've ever seen a wheel that falls to the inside like yours. I've owned some very low offset (near zero), very light wheels with the wheel face near the middle of the rim barrel and they didn't even do it. Ours have an inch plus of offset, the face weight is all ont he outside and they are pigs.

Per your first quote, is the inside edge of the tire significantly more worn that the outer edge? If so you have too much positive camber in the car and it's riding on the inside edges of the tire. I don't think it's a tire pressure issue because that would wear the middle (pressure too high) or the outer edges (pressure too low) or with really low pressure, the outside edge as the tire wants to roll off the rim all of the time.

Snow tires wear faster than OEM tires tires so if it's a set-up issue like camber then expect to chew through those pretty quickly. Since tread depth is critical for snows I wouldn't wait until I had evidence of ruining a second set of tires. The dealer might warranty your OEM tires but not likely to do anything for your aftermarket wheels with aftermarket snows.

Good luck.

 

Sorry for the poor explanation. The tread wear looks pretty uniform, but the wheel and tire does not want to stand straight on its own (off the car). That's my concern.

I did go check again, and they are, in fact, leaning to the OUTSIDE, so the wear is on the outside of the wheels closest to the face of the wheel. I was mistaken before when I said the opposite.

Thanks for the info.