My brother in law has a 95’ Subaru legacy. The tire place put two new tires on, but they’re a different size than what’s on the front. He drove it for about 2 months. Now his mechanic says its stuck in all wheel drive, because of the different size tires. My question is… Did he ruin his car? Or w…

The car is ALWAYS in AWD is it not?? Is there some kind of drivability problem?

Take a tape measure and go around the circumference(around tire) of front tire set and rear tire set. If the difference is greater than 1/2" it definitely damaged the AWD. How much is another question.

He says its hard to steer on pavement. If you drive over gravel, you can see all tires spinning. Like they’re engaged. I haven’t had the chance to measure the tires. If they are more than a 1/2" difference and the AWD is damaged. Is this something that I could fix myself? Or is this a specialized f…

It sounds like the viscous coupler/variable transfer clutch is “locked up”. Why/how did this damage take place? By using tires of different sizes on the car. The tire shop set up this sitation, due to their apparent ignorance of the importance of this issue on an AWD vehicle. The owner could hav…

What kind of transmission on the car? An automatic has a solenoid clutch pack at the end of automatic transmission. A manual transmission uses a viscous coupling for AWD. Both require lots of labor. Manual transmissions AWD are much more tolerant to mismatched tires. First step though is buying fou…

The use of different size tires on an AWD will cause problems. Usually sooner than later.

Your brother has damaged the AWD system on his Legacy by driving on mis-matched tires. Depending on the transmission type there are different fixes for this. Installing the correct size tires is not one of them, although he should do this anyway. If it’s a manual, tell him to drain and replace th…

Thanks so much for all the help. The car is a automatic. I think I’ll try the fuse trick. Would it be okay to leave this in permanently? I’m not to worried about using the awd anyway.

This is an odd story indeed. usually all we hear is someone complaining the tire store is trying to rip them off because they need 1 tire on their AWD vehicle and the shop wants them to get all 4 new ones.

Different size tires on all wheel drive

Maintenance/Repairs

texases March 9, 2010, 2:41am 2

If it’s now ‘stuck in all wheel drive’, something’s acting broken?, so he needs to get a complete set of matched tires (not old/new mixed) and get the drive train fixed. I would also press the ‘tire place’ to help with $$ (tires, at least), they should have known better.

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Different size tires on all wheel drive

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