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I had a friend go through 3 shops before he took it to the dealer and they finally did it properly (not that I'm endorsing a dealership in any way here).
I think maybe there's enough variability in how to adjust these vehicles that the apprentice that gets assigned to the aligning rack that day doesn't know how to read a procedure and do what the machine tells them to do, and doesn't do it with enough attention to detail.
Unfortunately the dealership is the one who isn’t getting it right. I figured they’d be able to do it best.
What's your complaint with the alignments?
The steering wheel is never centered. Alignment could be off too but I have little way of knowing that in the short term.
Probably because it is quicker to align one wheel to the other, rather than align two wheels to a centred steering wheel.
I never really thought about it before, but I used to have a car where the steering wheel was about 10 degrees off after having the wheels aligned. I assume they used the nearside wheel as the datum and aligned the offside wheel. Unfortunately the nearside wheel was getting a beating when I was curbing it.
They’re supposed to be using their fancy laser machine (Hunter)? I wouldn’t be surprised if they cut corners though.
How far off is the steering wheel? Is it possible it is very slight to account for highway crowning?
It’s definitely off. On flat roads it’s about 10 degrees off.
Are you by chance a large individual? Even a smaller person sitting in the car will affect the alignment, but a big MFer will affect it a lot.
I’m not a big guy. I know it’s wrong because one time they didn’t wrong twice on my truck and after complaining they finally got it perfectly set.
Gotcha! I can't say I've had the same experience. I've had good luck with Les Schwab and the one PointS that I've used.
I wonder if they're passing it off to junior techs?
Maybe. After complaining to a GM once after getting it wrong twice they got it spot on so not sure if that means the wrong person was doing the job or the right person doing it poorly.
The hell of it is that isn't anything to do with alignment, that's just laziness about finishing the job properly. After everything moves around during an alignment, then you set the steering wheel position at the end because it sometimes will change depending on what gets adjusted.
Yeah after doing some research I see there is a steering wheel angle sensor that should be reset. I’m going to ask them about it and if they can’t fix it I’ll try when my OBDEleven comes in and if that doesn’t work I’ll try another shop to see if it’s the shop or the car.
What's the vehicle YMM?
Definitely important. Almost anyone can align my pickup trucks but a performance car with AWD? That might be tough.
And some cars just suck.
I had one that would be perfectly aligned when I left the shop, and an hour later would be off. Crappy American car, subframe bushings had enough give to cause this, there was no fixing it.
Most recently a 2019 Atlas AWD but experienced this with other vehicles as well. Updated original post with vehicles.