For all the reports of rapid EV tire wear, it’s worth noting that more considerate use of vehicle power can go a long way to preserving tires. Lighten up on the accelerator pedal, and the driven wheels should be under far less strenuous conditions, right? Well, sometimes it’s not the driver’s right foot that’s the problem. There are plenty of reports of brand-new Tesla vehicles being shipped with a bad alignment, and as any mechanic can tell you, a bad alignment is a great way to wipe out a set of tires.
The first thing that drew our attention to this issue was a tweet from Kyle Conner claiming that multiple Teslas including his own Cybertruck required time on an alignment rack “straight from delivery.” That comment warranted a deeper look, because after more than a few incidents, it’s no longer isolated, right? It turns out that alignment problems on brand new Teslas appear to be somewhat common, on a variety of models and seemingly regardless of North American plant. Unsurprisingly, owners have been taking to the internet to document their plight,
One recent example is the experience of Tesla Motors Club forum poster BigMcGuire, who picked up a Model 3 back in August and quickly realized that the alignment didn’t feel quite right. As the user wrote, “Pulls to the right pretty good when I let go of the steering wheel.”
A couple of days later, BigMcGuire’s 2024 Model 3 was re-aligned by Tesla’s Santa Clara service center and everything was seemingly rectified. The user also included an alignment sheet in this follow-up post, which you can see if you click this link.
Holy crap, the right front corner was toed out by nearly half a degree! That’s the sort of issue that would normally take a curb strike to induce, but nope, this owner reports their Model 3 came straight off the truck like that. Oh, and BigMcGuire is far from the only owner reporting issues. Take Tesla Motors Club forum poster xfruan, for example. They allege their Model 3 was delivered with an off-center steering wheel due to an alignment issue, and Tesla Service didn’t seem to initially want to cover it under warranty.
Wow, not only does that steering wheel appear to indeed be off-center, $275 for an alignment on a new car sounds like a racket. Thankfully, this owner reports being able to roll up to a Tesla service center and have the alignment booked in for free under warranty, but not everyone has been so lucky. Multiple posts on this thread suggested just paying for an independent shop to align the car, and there are even cases where a bad alignment ran far outside the adjustment period.
Take Tesla Motors Club forum user ACRei, whose Model Y Performance was reportedly delivered with improper alignment. However, the alignment stayed out of track for months before ACRei realized something was wrong. One alignment later their Model Y Performance was good to go, and they even uploaded an alignment sheet to their forum post. The wild part? The right rear corner was toed out by 0.1 degrees when it should’ve been toed in by a little over 0.1 degrees. Everything else looked more or less good, it was just that one corner.
Why You Should Care About Your Car’s Alignment
So why is alignment so important? Well, your alignment dictates the relationship of your tires to the ground. The three main parameters that make up a single wheel’s alignment are camber, caster, and toe. Since caster only really affects tire wear when the wheels are turned, let’s look at the two big ones.
Camber tilts the tire on a horizontal axis relative to the road, affecting how the weight of the vehicle is distributed across the tire when driving in a straight line. Too much negative camber wears out the inside edge of the tread, while too much positive camber wears out the outside edge of the tread.
However, camber wear is positively undramatic compared to toe wear. Picture the tires on a single axle from the top — toe-in is when the tires are pigeon-toed towards each other, while toe-out is when the tires appear to be steered away from each other. Improperly set toe effectively scrubs tires diagonally across the road, which can rapidly deplete tread in just a few thousand miles.
If a bad alignment wears out your tires, you can throw on a new set of tires, but without correcting the alignment, those new tires will wear out just as quickly as the old ones. What’s more, having a technician perform a four-wheel alignment, assuming none of the adjustment hardware is seized from years of corrosion, is one of the less expensive things you can do to keep your car happy. It’s almost always far cheaper than a set of new tires, usually costing well less than $200 at an independent specialist. A set of brand new OEM Tesla-spec 255/45R19 Continental Procontact RX tires lists for $1,125.16 at Tire Rack, so if correcting a bad alignment increases tire life by 17 percent or more, you come out ahead with getting the alignment done.
Alignment issues are universal to all cars and not just Tesla, so this advice is applicable to anyone whose vehicle doesn’t have tank treads. Over time, cars naturally will go out of alignment and need to be dialed back into the correct factory settings.
The thing is, no new car should be handed off to a consumer with an out-of-spec alignment. Between factory quality control checks and pre-delivery inspections, most brands have multiple opportunities to rectify any alignment faults in new vehicles before everyday drivers take delivery. However, if an alignment issue slips through the cracks, owners usually have a short period of time to have it rectified.
In the case of Tesla, there is no explicit adjustment period given in the warranty handbook. In fact, the warranty materials state that alignment is not covered under the new vehicle limited warranty. While it might be possible to get an alignment immediately upon delivery covered under goodwill practices, it’s not guaranteed. Even though bad alignment definitely won’t affect every new Tesla, it’s something to watch out for. Better an alignment now than prematurely worn tires later, right?
(Photo credits: Tesla, Tesla Motors Club forum)
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It’s been the same with EV9s. Take a look at the forums and there are many stories of bad alignment at delivery.
What’s the deal with Tesla owners saying staff at service centers “went above and beyond” or “went out of their way”, to just do basic service tasks, literally just doing their jobs?.. They really all do have a superiority complex thinking they’re getting some special service they wouldn’t otherwise get without Tesla, when in reality, they’d likely be better off with any other new car at any other service center
Typical Tesla TRASH…none of the drivers are straight anyway
this is not just a Telsa thing.
My new nissan this eyar was toe in on one side and tow out on other from factory
shop was saying new Rangers in AU are even worse with some drivers seeing trashed ties in under 4000km
Yeah, chaotic evil, we know.
Now I am no expert but I can tell within a half mile if my alignment is way out of whack. If the claims are true they are fighting this car every step of the way. How does the autopilot handle this failure? If they don’t notice for a year they aren’t car people. Maybe I know where to plug it in people? Not that Tesla build quality isn’t horrible but if you know this and buy it anyway maybe test it?
If they’re doing steer by wire, I imagine, just like TPMS sensors are only aware of changes relative to their last calibration, whoever gets in and calibrates the system is only messing with the software. Basically initializing the system and getting the wheel to point straight up. Autopilot may not be aware.
Is the first post really referring to a Model 3 as an M3 or is it actually a BMW M3?
Blasphemy otherwise.
Yes, I realize that if the former, it’s probably on a Tesla forum and so context…
Back to topic: just another inexcusable quality issue from Tesla.
I imagine people who actively sign up for Tesla forums are unaware that any other car brands exist.
I specifically came down here to complain about that. Some of them get all pissy and say the M3 (the real one) doesn’t count but the majority just can’t be assed to type out model 3
That annoyed me the second I saw it too. I would have said just typing 3 is preferable to M3, but I used to have a Mazda 3 so that also feels slanderous to me.
No surprise that people who can’t be bothered to type out “Model” also can’t bring themselves to drive their own car and would prefer an incompetent AI do it for them.
The three of you just made my day! Sometimes I just assume I live in the void, but you proved me other wise.
Since you bring up the Mazda 3, I’ve seen people do the same thing and abbreviate that and the Mazda 5 as the M3 and M5… laziness knows no bounds, and can’t be bothered to find them even if it wanted to know.
But “disrupt the industry!” every legacy car makers does an alignment before sending the vehicle out, we are different, we are special, we go fast and break stuff! Isn’t that exciting?
Maybe Musk needs to lay off the ketamine before making decisions.
I wonder what an alignment runs on a Hummer EV with the crabwalk feature. While relatively few distance gets covered in that mode, it just seems like there would be many more ways for the alignment to get messed up. Likewise with cars that have four-wheel steering of any type.
Probably no different than other alignment. The procedure to check and/or correct the alignment on a 4-wheel-steering vehicle is the same as a 2 wheel vehicle. Might be a few more adjustments on 4-wheel, but they both go on the same calibration machine the same way. It’s really not much different.
Considering how the Tesla buyers frequently talk about their expensive “paint correction” jobs after delivery, a little alignment problem seems like small change.
I put a very slight toe-in on my 3-wheeler. About 0.2 degrees. There’s no appreciable front tire scrub/wear induced by it, but I can take my hands off the steering bars at 50 mph and it tracks straight on smooth roads.
Screwing this simple thing up is sheer incompetence.
I’m old enough to picture a Honda ATC350X and thought “how the hell do you toe that in?!”
Mine is a custom-built human powered vehicle with a 10 kW electric assist in its most recent operational guise. Old pics:
https://i.imgur.com/1KvhZN8.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/j75uGn7.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/tzO209r.jpg
It’s a car substitute that can pass as a “bicycle” to law enforcement, and legally so in some places. It has 16″ DOT wheels, solar car tires, full suspension, and hydraulic disc brakes. Ready-to-ride weight of 91 lbs, estimated 0.20 m^2 CdA. I could disable the electric motor and pedal it to 35 mph on flat ground in a sprint and hold like 22 mph continuously just using my legs. Using the electric motor, its 0-30 mph acceleration time was about 2.5 seconds, top speed was 50 mph. It corners like a go-kart and won’t tip in hard cornering, but instead skids. With a 1.8 kWh battery pack, it had a 200 mile range at 30 mph with light pedaling effort and the motor doing the rest.
It’s being upgraded to AWD with front hub moors, and will have a much more slippery body on it with a windshield and roof, plus a roll cage and safety harness. The peak power will increase to 20 kW or more and I’m looking at an 85+ mph top speed after the upgrade is done. The acceleration is going to be ridiculous. The goal is to be able to troll expensive performance cars with my “bicycle”. I already took a V6 Charger in a stoplight drag at 10 kW, before he overtook me at 35 mph as the low voltage battery pack and BEMF caused the motor to reach flux saturation. More voltage will give me a 0-60 mph time, but it can’t reach 60 yet unless I’m going downhill.
Great headline.
Right up there with “Toe My God!!”
Much better
When I worked for [REDACTED large legacy OEM] one of the most frequent claims we got on cars was for alignment. This is despite the fact that every single car gets aligned and must hit the allowed tolerance before leaving the alignment station, as an aside seeing cars get aligned in 2 minutes means I have a seriously hard time waiting for a normal show to do an alignment on my cars. The issue was the alignment got all kinds of screwed up during transport, loading cars onto trucks and railcars with guides to position them correctly that simulate the cars being bumped into curbs threw alignment all out of whack. I can even recall an instance where wheel weights were knocked off and the wheel became unbalanced on several cars. With this in mind some of the dealers would just align cars as they arrived weather they needed it or not.
Or the employees just fake it using one car in spec over and over to get past that union quality? Lol
That’s a valuable insight. It seems that Tesla does not have a PDI process, where such an issue would be caught post-delivery.
I guess Tesla doesn’t realize that alignment can be affected during transport, so it’s up to the customer to ensure the vehicle drives straight.
Buyers should be made aware that they are doing their own PDI.
Tesla don’t allow pdi. You have to sign the delivery before you can touch them or get in, then complain and get a later appointment. Cybertruck deliveries have been a fuckfest
Hmmm, I couldn’t possibly imagine why a company like Telsa doesn’t allow PDIs…
1/2 a degree of negative toe is wild. I just had an alignment because -0.12 degrees was scrubbing my tires down in short order. That’s a big mistake, and the fact that it’s only toe with no camber issue points to it coming fresh off the truck that way. A strike big enough for half a degree would have other impacts.
I thought that most often the factory specs were for a nominal amount of toe-in (so the car tracks straight) so having the car delivery with any toe-out is really bad. And it seems like this is unlikely to be a delivery problem. My dad used to check the alignment of his cars by taking his hands off the wheel on the middle lane of a straight highway (so that the drainage slope of the road was even on both sides). I do this on occasion, but less frequently than he did – modern cars with rack & pinion steering seem to stay in alignment much better than the old-school designs with center-links.
Toe-out makes the car react to a turn input more quickly, but also leads to a “darty” feeling as well as increasing tire wear. The reason for a bit of toe-in is that as the car moves ahead, friction pulls the tires back just a bit and results in zero toe-in so the car feels stable and tire wear is even across the entire surface.
0.5 is pretty insane, considering that even most race cars never go beyond 0.15. I think the only ones that do are NASCAR stock cars, and that’s because they’re racing on banked tracks where the right side needs extreme positive toe and negative camber while the left needs the inverse to keep the car from losing it when hitting the bank.
could be manufacturing tolerance or it could be the measurement devices are out of spec.
All of the measurement devices are out of spec? Highly doubt that. This is just typical shoddy Tesla build and subpar end-user delivery experience.