I had a wheel alignment august 1st, 2024 at 65,000 miles to correct a steering wheel grabbing symptom.
Car is at 70,000 miles now.
I’ll be getting new tires this week ( all 4 of them will be new ).
I don’t see the point in getting another costly alignment but I’m not a pro.
Does a car need an alignment every time the tires are replaced with new ones ?
To answer your question, no…
Could you have hit a pothole or other bumps in the road and knock it out of alignment, yes…
The best thing to do is have it checked…The print out of the alignment should show the alignment specs and green good, red bad… lol
BTW I have lifetime alignments on every vehicle in my fleet since 2004 except for my new truck, but will include it when I have it checked, but I check and align all of them every 5,000 miles for best wear as well as handling and braking… They are almost always out a little…But the Nashville area is not known for having smooth roads either… lol
You have uneven wear on your tires, right? In that case I would. Otherwise, no.
The uneven wear on the tires is the result of not changing all tires at once, pointed out to me by Naveda.
So I’m going to decline an alignment, especially that the recent alignment corrected the steering wheel problem.
I’m conservative, so I get an alignment with new tires (which for me is around every 30,000 miles) to be safe. However, 5,000 miles is recent enough that I’d probably skip it.
That would be unequal distance or miles. Replacing individual tires does not cause rapid wear, each tire will last about the same distance of travel. When people refer to “uneven wear”, it means across the tread surface of each tire.
I have performed hundreds of wheel alignments on Lexus vehicles, every 5 years is sufficient.
There’s no such thing as an alignment “check”. At least, not at the 4 or 5 shops in southwest Connecticut where I had alignments done during my 36 or so years of driving there.
At least two of those places said to me “The only way to “check” your alignment is to do one”.
How a tire wears is a good clue on suspension issues.
In your other thread you quoted different tread depths for tires on the same axle. That’s why I recommended an alignment.
That is utter BS, the company I retired from did 5-20+ alignment checks every day, some needed it, some did not, we always (unless out of ink) showed the customer the results…
Here is a Hunter Alignment machine print out below…
So how do you know how much or what to adjust if not 1st checking to see what is out of spec… That is the dumbest thing I have heard in a while… So do you replace a ball joint just to see if it needed it or not??? Come on Chris, you know better…
The before measurement at the top is the check, the below measurement is the correction or alignment… If the top one is all green , no need for an alignment, or if the customer declines to set the alignment then no alignment is preformed hence alignment check…
BTW The sheet below was after having an alignment done 5,000 miles before hand…
You can align a vehicle and hit a hard pothole or something and knock it right back out of adjustment… I put 4- 80,000 mile tires on my wifes car with an alignment, she hit a pothole in the road and knocked it back out, absolutely killed both front tires in 5,000 miles, had to replace 2 tires and do it again…
BTW, I would stop using those shops as they do not know or understand how alignments work…
If you want more prof, I am sure I have other pictures or can take pictures of the ones in the glove boxes, worst case I can ask a couple of shops to text me pictures of alignment sheets, I can load this page up with them if you wish… 
I’m not kidding.I’m just relating here what I was told, not defending it.
I asked for a printout of my current conditions, and they all told me the same thing: “We cannot generate a printout unless we do the alignment”. So I paid to have it done and got my sheet.
They are mostly reputable indies, and one decent dealership. And they did good alignments. One even honored my request for more toe in (but still in spec).
That’s what they really meant.
Most shops won’t entertain “window shoppers”, if you want the vehicle to go on the alignment rack, you need to bring enough money for a wheel alignment.
About ten years ago the dealership set up a wheel alignment check station on the service drive. It was a sales tool for the service writers to promote wheel alignments, but not very accurate. That lasted about two years, I believe they received a lot of complaints about the driveway attendants monkeying around with the vehicles and pushing cars back and forth leaving handprints on paint.
So they put a vehicle on the rack and the alignment was within specs (all good) and you are saying that they still charged the customer full price??
If not, then that is called an alignment check…
I had a Mustang come in on the hook with a tire blown out from a pothole, it needed 4 tires anyway and had uneven tire wear, I sold the customer 4 tires and an alignment up front, well once it made it to the alignment rack and checked we found the alignment to be in specs, almost perfect… I down sold (GASP) from an alignment to a free alignment check… Should I have ripped the customer off and charged them for something not done???
It is not window shopping if it does not need it… Now I agree that just doing an alignment check for the heck of it is about useless…
My recommendation is to never get an alignment unless YOU detect a problem. As long as your tires wear evenly and last as long as you expected them to last, the alignment is good. Even potholes do not throw off an alignment although hitting a curb hard at an angle might.
If you have components that affect the alignment replaced, i.e ball joints, tie rods, bushings etc, then you will have to have an alignment when that work is done.
I do not trust “alignment checks” either. Sears and NTW (?) used to do “free” alignment checks with every set of tires purchased, All cars needed alignments. My wife fell for that while I was on a cruise (Navy), the OEM tires lasted 80k miles, the upgraded replacements from Sears with an alignment only lasted 20k.
My daughter also fell for that at NTW, I took the car back immediately and had them check again, they got completely different readings, same store different rack, then I took it to another NTW and got a third set of readings that did not match the first two. Then I had it aligned properly by a reputable mechanic.
Thanks Keith. Great info.
My car ( A Lexus IS ) eats tire aggressively and is well documented here: All about Lexus IS premature inner tire wear - ClubLexus - Lexus Forum Discussion
I hadn’t known before purchasing my car that the Lexus IS would force me to change tires every 15k-20k miles, despite the tire brand ( continental ) claiming I can get about 45k-50k miles on them.
My car is poorly designed by Lexus, and, as a result, I’ll need to change tires pretty frequently.
If you had asked on this forum prior to buying that car, people would have told you BMW vehicles are high maintenance.
Funny you mentioned this because I love BMWs and chose the Lexus believing it was cheaper to maintain.
The BMW series 3 has similar supportive seats to the IS.
Any car is expensive to maintain, if you keep it several years
