Tyre Wear Affect Steering Wheel Location?

[No Crust Racing]

Not a Skyline but the principal should be universal.

Does tyre wear on its own affect steering wheel location?

We recently had a work car go in for service and they admit that during this time work was done that affected the steering wheel location as I immediately noticed that it was now off centre (and this has never been a problem for this car or on the current tyres).

They tell me they've gotten it "as straight as they can on those tyres" as the tyres are just on the tread indicators and that the fact that the tyres are getting due for replacement is the determining factor.

In my head, the amount of remaining tread should have no impact on the steering wheel location and only the actual suspension geometry should affect this.

Correct or am I overlooking something?

[The Bogan]

I call shinanigans.

Ive had 11ty hundred wheel alignments on all sorts of wheel and tyre combinations and have never had that issue.

First thing they usually do is lock the steering wheel in the straight ahead position before they start aligning or mucking around with the arms and stuff.

Unless they just played with the suspension and didnt do a alignment, which would be 10 dodgy things..

Agian, I call shinanigans.

[No Crust Racing]

Anyone who works in the industry want to wade in on this?

I've had steering wheel be out from toe adjustments sure, but never because of worn tyres, whicc still have a good few mm on them anyway.

[R31Nismoid]

If it went in on the same tyres it came out with

and went in with a straight wheel and now it's not

tyres are irrelevant, clearly they've done something

[No Crust Racing]

Agreed, when I picked it up the wheel was straight again.

He maintained that it wasn't dead on but that was the tyres...

I showed him the pic I took of it off centre and asked if they had replaced the tyres to get it straighter, which of course they hadn't...

[GTSBoy]

Dealer service?

[Duncan]

I can't confirm tyres affecting the steering wheel position (doesn't make sense to me), but I have certainly had old tyres/ out of round which made the car pull to one side even though the alignment was perfect

[No Crust Racing]

Yeah dealer.

Duncan the car drove straight, no pulling just crooked steering wheel.

[GTSBoy]

Yeah dealer.

Well there's your problem. There are approximately 0.01% of all dealer mechanics you can trust to pick up a spanner correctly, let alone do anything properly on a car. Turn around, walk away (or run, or drive real fast) and never go back.

[No Crust Racing]

I'm inclined to agree. I'll look around for other options. The problem being, the car is a Prius so "some" knowledge is required to look after it properly.

Example, the dealer pro-actively replaced the water pump (not sure if it was the engine water pump or the water pump fir the inverter) under recall. A non Toyota dealer probably would not have known it was required.

I'll be emailing them this morning to detail my experience there as the feedback, if taken correctly, should be useful to them.

[simpletool]

Wow, and Toyota typically has the best training program. Maybe they ran out of good techs when they sent them all to Lexus?

[Hank Scorpio]

Yes it can.

You can do a wheel alignment on worn tyres setting the steering wheel straight and then go and get new tyres put on which can send the steering wheel slightly off centre.

[No Crust Racing]

It'd have to be some pretty serious tyre wear Lach, I rang two different places yesterday and both said it was bollocks.

I got a call back from the Toyota dealership about it around lunch time, as it turns out, they performed 2 recalls on the car and guess what the second one involved, removing the steering shaft... The manager also mentioned that the guy out the front should not be dispensing mechanical information as he's not trained and that the guys out the back were "misinformed" as the tyre wear should not be an issue.

Anyway, it's straight now.