Trusting again who's business did a bad alignment and ruined my tires

I am in need of help. I am very very good at taking care of my Santa Fe. I have all the maintance and oil changes, tires alignments and stuff done that is required. I recently went to a place I have been dealing with for many years. There is a new Manager and employees. I had a alignment in April after the bad weather had past just like I always do. My tires are not even 2 years old and they are 75k mile tires. The alignment was not right the first time. I took it back 2 days later. They did another one. Now 2 months later the Alignment has ruined my tires to the point I need new tires. The Manager hes trying every which way to make it sound like my car has stuff wrong with it. He tried to say I needed new struts, and shocks. Now upon further inspection my right tie rod is loose and joint is rusted. I just dont trust them. I had it checked out at another mechanics and they said there is nothing wrong with my truck. This company has said they are going to replace my tires and of course I am not trusting them. can anyone tell me what I should do? I was wondering if the bad alignment would cause the tie rod and joint to go bad I have just this one vehicle. Financially I am terrified they are causing problems just to make me spend money. I am suppose to go back thursday for the new tires and alignment.

I would go back and get my free new tires and free alignment. I would not let them do anything else. I would then find a good, independent shop that does alignment and have the alignment checked and readjusted if necessary. It sounds as though the new employees don’t know what they are doing. I had a similar problem 46 years ago at a Sears auto service center when I was in graduate school. I learned that an expert is needed for a proper alignment. It turned out that Sears had the wbeels toe set out instead of in.

^ +1

In the future, if your car is driving straight, no pull, tread wear even, then don’t get an alignment. They can only mess it up.

It’s impossible to say what’s going on as the tire wear patterns are not known nor is the miles on your vehicle. An incorrect alignment will not cause a tie rod or anything else to wear other than tires.
Worn tie rods, ball joints, wheel bearings, tie rod ends, control arm bushings, etc WILL cause tires to wear.

Any wear in any of those parts means the customer should be notified and that proceeding with an alignment will more than likely be a waste of time.

At this point I would drop the conspiracy theory though. The fact that you’re facing a situation that you don’t like doesn’t mean there is anything nefarious going on at all.

And what year is this? And how many miles are on it?
Further, can you post a photo of the wear? Different types of wear indicate different problems. Wear can be a really good indicator of what might be wrong.
And read OK4450’s post. He’s listed a lot of possibilities.

Lastly, if you don’t trust this shop, why do you keep going back?

In general, alignments are a big money maker. Once you start letting someone who has that in mind, you go down the path of habitually realigning your car, it’s hard to break it off. Once you loose the trust of a repair shop, move on, even if it cost you a little money.

First, tires don’t unwear themselves. If there was an alignment problem and the tires developed a bad wear pattern, then an new alignment will only wear a new pattern on top of what is already there. It shouldn’t be a surprise to find that the tire wear pattern didn’t get fixed. The only fix is replacing the tires.

Plus we need more facts to work against. What is the wear pattern? How many miles on the tires when the alignment was done? How many miles since?

2 additional thoughts:

  1. 75K miles is what the warranty says, but NO ONE should expect to get that. Tire wear is driven by how many turns you make vs how many miles you drive. City driving wears tires out faster than country driving.

  2. Santa Fe’s have alignment specs that possibly could wear tires funny. In other words, the spec is NOT set up to get good tire wear. It shouldn’t be a surprise to get bad tire wear out of a Santa Fe.

Because this shop is offering to replace the tires and a free alignment…I go for it.

But I would watch the tire wear closely and if you see any problems showing up, get an alignment somewhere else.

Yosemite

“But I would watch the tire wear closely and if you see any problems showing up, get an alignment somewhere else.”

I would get the new tires and take the vehicle to a good independent alignment shop immediately. I just went through a scenario just like this about a year or so ago with my wife’s vehicle. The job was totally bungled by the first shop and the second shop spent over an hour just getting the alignment back where it should be.

+1 to missileman’s post.
My gut is telling me that alignment isn’t the cause of the tire wear. Repeatedly aligning a vehicle and repeatedly getting poor wear should be taken as a sign that there may be other problems.

+1 to the same mountainbike.