Bad Car Alignment: Symptoms And All You Need To Know

Wheel and tire alignment is important if you want to use a car to its full potential and reflect its intrinsic durability.

It ensures that vehicle tires operate at a hundred percent practical efficiency and prevents them from premature tear.

However, keeping our cars aligned to enjoy these underlying benefits can be difficult. Just by virtue of everyday driving, vehicles can become misaligned. Combined with environmental and other factors, the possibility of misalignment increases.

While these factors can be uncontrollable most of the time, the availability of alignment correction and proper vehicle management practices has ensured that you can easily mitigate their effects to avoid expensive repairs and frequent visits to the auto mechanic.

What is Car Alignment?

A car alignment as the name suggests is adjustments made to a vehicle's system of suspensions to keep its four wheels symmetrically aligned and in balanced contact with the ground.

The suspension system features many precision components that ensure that the car's four wheels are rotating synchronously in the same direction.

A car is misaligned when any one or more of the precision components that are present in the suspension system falls out of place or wears out.

How Does A Car Gets Misaligned

There are three major contributing factors to a car's misalignment; the driver, the road or the vehicle's worn out components. Additional causes of car misalignment can be:

• Unmitigated impact from hitting obstacles such as potholes, curbs and speed bumps or an accident.

• Wear and tear of precision suspension components like the poor shocks or strut

• Ad-hoc vehicle modification such as lifting. When the vehicle is raised beyond factory designs, the suspension is negatively impacted and out of sync. Your vehicle is in danger of misalignment if you don't adjust the suspension to compensate for your modification.

Although bumps and potholes might be insignificant obstacles at low speed, this is not the case at high speeds. A slight contact could potentially lead to your car's misalignment.

Symptoms Of Bad Alignment

Sometimes your car's misalignment might not be because if an elaborate suspension condition and it could just be due to your underinflated tires.

However, there are notable symptoms that your car shows when it is misaligned.

• Vehicle veers diagonally. When you are driving hands free, if the vehicle veers to the left or right and does not continue in its straight motion it is most likely misaligned.

• Unbalanced steering wheel. If you are moving in a straight line and your steering isn't horizontally balanced, you need to get an alignment right away.

• Loose steering. This essentially means that there is wear in certain components of the transmission system that you should fix as soon as possible.

• Vibrating steering wheel. If your steering wheel vibrates while you are driving, it is most likely due to misalignment or unbalanced wheels.

• Uneven tire wear. If you notice uneven wear in your tire threads, it definitely means that your car is misaligned. Aligned wheels typically have the same thread depth.

 

To ensure next level protection against misalignment, you should incorporate the use of streamlined and pressure sensitive tires in your car. You can consult a tyre installation fairfield professional to explore your options.