Car pull to left even after replacing four new tires, alignment and new tie rod

There are two important details that need to be considered. First, was the pull there before the new tires were installed? Second, it sounds like you may be making a very common mistake. Your mechanic said the car has a pull to the left, and you said the car "tended to pull over left with the steer wheel straight".

It sounds like the alignment is not right or you have a defective new tire. I would try rotating the tires front to back to see if that changes it.

A pull, often called a "drift", is when the car goes toward the ditch or on-coming traffic when you let go of the steering wheel. It has absolutely nothing to do with the position of the steering wheel. You can take the steering wheel off and throw it away, but the car should still go reasonably straight. Now, common sense comes into play, but it is not so common for car owners. That pull or lack of pull depends on a huge list of variables. One is the road you are on. Most roads lean to the right so rain runs off, and any car is going to follow that lean and pull to the right. We address that during the alignment by adjusting in a slight pull to the left to offset that "road crown". A road that affects one car will not affect a different car, so that is another variable. Next, all roads lean different amounts in different places. We can only adjust the alignment for the closest average and that is usually a good compromise.

The second condition is a crooked steering wheel. There can be different causes for that too, and they can be confusing at first. If you let go of the steering wheel at highway speed and the car goes straight for a good quarter mile, you do not have a pull. If the steering wheel is not centered at that time, you simply have an offset or crooked steering wheel. That is addressed with the alignment and is the last step in the procedure. There were some cars and trucks years ago on which after the alignment was finished, if the steering wheel was not centered, you were to physically unbolt it, remove it, then set it back on straight. Doing that did nothing to the alignment. It just made for a centered steering wheel.

Where the confusion comes in is when someone has a crooked steering wheel, and they put it straight, then the car steers to the side. Of course the car is going to go the way they turned the steering wheel, but that is not a pull. That is a crooked steering wheel. If you tell the mechanic you have a pull for that symptom, he is going to test drive and test drive trying to figure out what you are talking about so he can determine what to correct in the alignment. He will be working on the wrong thing.

You must also understand that each side of the car has an inner tie rod and an outer tie rod screwed together. They are screwed together more or less, similar to a turnbuckle on a screen door, to lengthen or shorten that linkage, and that sets the position that tire is steering. The last step of the alignment procedure is to lock the steering wheel perfectly straight, then adjust each pair of tie rod ends to make each wheel steer straight ahead. Those adjustments are very precise. When a tie rod is worn, it can allow that wheel to turn a little but it can be hard to notice at first. It will show up as a specific tire wear pattern long before you will notice the steering wander.

I have to be careful on how I describe this, but speaking in simplistic terms, a worn tie rod end will not cause a pull. For this sad example, lets say a left tie rod end is worn and you have a front-wheel-drive car. Typically what happens is when you accelerate, the left tire tugs forward and the sloppy tie rod end lets it turn a little to the right. Naturally the car is going to go to the right, so you have to turn the steering wheel to the left to counteract that. What you are doing is turning the right tire to the left a little. Both tires will be steering toward the center of the car equally, so the car will go straight. The symptom, if it is bad enough to even notice, is the steering wheel will be off-center to the left, but again, that is not a pull. The car is going straight, so it is not pulling.


Please let us know what you find. We are interested to see what it is.

Cheers

I have had similar problems & have read many posts. What most people don't consider is the quality of the alignment. I would never have my car aligned anywhere but at the dealer. Alignment machines must be calibrated regularly to insure that they show accurate results. In many cases, the machine is off & as a result the car gets aligned to the wrong specs. Having a discount or franchise tire center align your vehicle does not rule out an alignment problem, and can actually cause one. I would have them swap tires side to side & front to back to rule out a tire defect (conicity) issue, & then go to your dealer for the alignment & evaluation of your suspension. They charge more, but you save in the long run.

Thanks for your comments, but the dealers don't necessarily charge more. I was the alignment specialist at a very nice family-owned Chrysler dealership through all of the 1990s. People came to us to get second opinions after getting unreasonable estimates at the Midas franchise across the street. At the same time, we rolled our eyes when we heard what the local Goodyear dealer was charging per hour for labor, and for alignments. My dealership was actually one of the lowest-priced places in our city.

Also realize that what dealers mostly see are cars still under warranty, or those owned by happy customers from years earlier who hadn't found other shops they preferred to go to. As such, most of what I worked on wasn't all rusty yet, or old enough to have sagged springs. The cars were new enough to be owned by people with money to keep good tires on them.

Before this, I worked at a Sears Auto Center. We had the most antiquated alignment equipment imaginable, but we were able to get good results with it. We hadn't even heard of an "alignment computer".

We also have about a dozen tire and alignment specialty shops in my city, most with very good reputations. The quality of the alignments have more to do with the managers than with the equipment. One manager in particular is extremely fussy about what his employees must do before a car is considered "good enough" to give back to the customer. At my dealership, I had a reputation of taking "a little longer than everyone else", as the office manager put it, "but we knew your cars weren't coming back with complaints". Sometimes that means running it up on the rack a second time to get the steering wheel perfectly straight. It's the pits when you get paid 1.3 hours to do a four-wheel alignment, but you know it's going to be 1.7 hours before you're satisfied. When I took too long, I worked part of that time for free, so I lost and the dealer lost, but in my ten years at the dealership, the last nine as their only alignment tech, no one ever once yelled at me for working too slowly. It was better to give away a little of my labor today than to have to do the job over for free another day.

Also be aware all alignment computers can be set to read angles to tenths of a degree or to hundredths of a degree. When you're interested in speed, you set it to read to tenths of a degree. It's real easy to get all the number to turn green, meaning they're in specs, but conscientious mechanics set their computers to read to hundredths of a degree for more accuracy. Another advantage of working at the dealership was I saw mostly the same models every day, and I knew what worked best for them. In the case of all the front-wheel-drive cars and minivans, I found that if I adjusted in 0.06 degrees camber pull to the left to offset road crown, I never had a customer come back with a complaint of pulling. 0.04 degrees wasn't enough, and 0.10 was too much. If the computer was set to round those readings off to tenths of a degree, 0.24 would be rounded off to 0.2 degrees, and 0.30 would be 0.3 degrees. That gave a perfect 0.06 degree difference, but on the computer it looked like 0.1, which is too much.

0.27 and 0.33 degrees would also be perfect, but the computer would show both sides equal at 0.3 degrees, which is not good. To put this in perspective, when we used old equipment with light bulbs and metal scales, we could read them to 1/8th degree accuracy, and to 1/16th degrees if we were careful. That was fine for old, heavy rear-wheel-drive cars, but as I pointed out, newer cars need to be dialed in to much tighter tolerances.

Now, to be fair to your comment about dealers charging more, we have a Buick / GMC dealer just down the road, a Cadillac dealer across town, and we used to have a fantastic import dealer, and a reputable Ford dealer. All of us would borrow service manuals back and forth, and we'd often fix each others' trade-ins. The one notable exception was the Chevy dealer. He has to be one of the biggest crooks in the county if not the state. People who insist on owning a Chevy often drive 15 or 30 miles to other cities to avoid the dealer right here. He is the guy who gives all dealers a bad rap, and he has bought up the Ford and multiple import dealers. He has done wonders for Chrysler, Dodge, and GMC sales due to all the customers he has made angry. GM has a lot of ways figured out on how to separate you from your money after the sale, but this dealer takes that to a whole new level. The rest of the dealers have a steady stream of happy, repeat customers. Mechanics often know them by name, and they ask to have certain people work on their cars.

You know you're doing something right when some customer comes in with a huge box of donuts about once a week.

Thanks for adding your comments.