9
Follow-Up - Alignment Off - 2019 Atlas
(lemmy.world)
Hi again. I took the car back to the dealer to re-align and the wheel is still turned to the left a little when driving straight. The tech showed me the numbers and that they leveled the steering wheel.
Is something wrong with my suspension, or should I try alignment somewhere else? Just live with it?
EDIT: when I let the wheel go and I’m going straight on a stretch of road the wheel is off center by about 10 degrees.
EDIT EDIT: called the dealership and they said alignment doesn’t include resetting wheel sensor via obd tool. Crazy.
It really depends on the available adjustment of the vehicle in question. The sensitivity to something like the slope of the road and tracking poorly is largely a factor of trail distance.
Think of a shopping cart front wheel. The way they follow whatever direction the cart is pushed. The steering center is the center of the upper bearing mount of the cart wheel. The trail is how far behind the center that the wheel touches the ground. The trail distance of a shopping cart front wheel is massive and illustrates the idea well.
Every steering system on a wheeled vehicle gets its speed stability from the trail distance of the front wheels. The resistance you feel in the steering wheel (on a vehicle where there is a mechanical linkage to a steering rack) is mostly the resistance from the trail distance (and hydraulic assistance to overcome this force).
Your trail distance may not be adjustable on your car. In terms of alignment, if the trail distance is very short, any small perturbation in caster and camber will create odd behaviors.
Alignment is not just about getting things strait, it is about tuning the caster, camber, trail, and toe to get the behavior you are looking for.
If I have explained it poorly, perhaps this article will help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caster_angle
I'm probably a major outlier here, but I can align and tune a car's handling in my garage with a tape measure. All it takes are repeatable measurements and a mental picture of how all of the adjustments impact performance. The threaded rods are all the precision you are actually working with. So if you loosen the jam nuts and turn 1/4 rotation on each side, you just made a precision adjustment. A couple of grease pens to mark positions is helpful. There is no real magic other than the magic of understanding the geometry.
Understood but shouldn’t the dealership be able to control all available adjustments when doing an alignment? Camber shouldn’t be an issue.
I know it’s not the slope of the road because I’ve driven in the middle of a road, and even on roads that slope to the left and same issue.
This car also has drive by wire so no direct connection. I wonder if I could just adjust that somehow if the wheels are truly aligned properly.
I can't say what your car does or does not have in terms of adjustment.
Was it ever perfect? Do you know the entire vehicle history personally and has it been hit? I can the you several ways to determine crash history empirically. Never trust dealers or Carfax like reports.