2012 WRX Inside Tire Wear

I've got a buddy who's got a 2012 WRX with a tire wear issue.

Basically, the car is his pride and joy and he babies it, no corner carver here. The inside of the tires are getting choppy after only a few thousand miles. These are 280TW Contis. Pretty darn soft for a guy who don't really like driving hard.

We've got a few solutions. One would be to go with less soft, higher tread wear tires. Another would be do dial camber as close to 0 as possible.

Is there another issue I'm not thinking of? Basically the alignment is bone stock specs.

I'd move the camber close to zero. A granny driver running negative camber could create that wear pattern, but camber itself usually isn't that bad for wear, even if the car never corners hard. Camber plus significant toe-out causes massive inner tread wear.

Setting toe will make more of a difference than adjusting camber. If the inside of the tires are wearing out too quickly, the tires are most likely toed out a little too much.

Find a good alignment shop in your area (not your typical Firestone or NTB), tell them how the car is used, what is expected from it performance-wise, and that you're focused on tire longevity.

Is the toe set properly? That will kill tires way faster than camber. The other option is to drive harder so the outside wears at the same rate.

toe would be factory spec

tires are choppy on insides of all four wheels. Could we conclude that the toe is too aggressive on all four wheels? I have my doubts..

If the toe is really zero then I'd move the camber closer to zero...but toe-out is almost always the real culprit for inner tread wear. So +1 for an alignment, at a shop that knows what they're doing. I'd recommend taking it to a race shop.

camber doesn't wear tires anywhere near as much as toe will. likely a toe out situation. camber and toe combined can accelerate wear as well

awd scrub can cause some issues too

We can do all of our own alignments on a lasered machine. When we checked the alignment earlier this year all wheels were within spec. We could easily do an alignment ourselves on that machine.

The problem is not that it was previously aligned wrong, the problem is that the factory settings are meant for aggressive drivers.

Well there's a GD WRX that gets worked on at the same shop as my 'rolla, the driver just DDs it other than occasionally gunning it in a straight line on the street, it's running zero camber and it seems to have good even tire wear.

We'll have to try it out. Thanks!

PHeller wrote: toe would be factory spec tires are choppy on insides of all four wheels. Could we conclude that the toe is too aggressive on all four wheels? I have my doubts..

Toe should be zero. Is it zero or something other than zero, but still in factory spec?

When the time comes buy some harder tires to get better longevity. No point in sticky tires since your friend doesn't care about cornering and the WRX has plenty of straight line grip from the AWD system.

Seems like a strange car for him to own. I have a '12 WRX that I bought because of the way it drives and in spite of the looks, the interior, the mileage. I can't imagine buying one if I didn't like to drive with some vigor. Did he just want an AWD car for snow or something?

I don't have a similar tire wear issue on mine, BTW.

AWD for snow (rarely drives it in snow)

Classic case of "I bought it because I like them and they are fast."

Although he has considered doing an auto-x with it eventually.

PHeller wrote: The inside of the tires are getting choppy after only a few thousand miles.

He drives like a little girl and does a lot of city driving.

That's the tl;dr non-diplomatic explanation.

Being within factory spec doesn't necessarily mean anything. On some cars one wheel can have positive camber while the other has negative camber, and they're both still in spec. What were the actual alignment values? What is the factory spec range? Who knows, it might even be possible you could adjust to values that are still within factory spec, and it would be enough to correct the issue.

Knurled wrote:

PHeller wrote: The inside of the tires are getting choppy after only a few thousand miles.

He drives like a little girl and does a lot of city driving. That's the tl;dr non-diplomatic explanation.

I can't say that. He may be watching.

Don't know if the 2012 is exactly the same or not, but here's what the unverified source I quickly found on the internet says for the 2011.

Camber (-.333 to -1.333 degree)

Toe (-0.080 to +0.080 inch)

So it can be toe out and still be within spec. Staying on the small side of the camber spec and keeping toe as near as possible to 0 (erring on the toe-in side) would probably suit him well.

In reply to Driven5:

That's right, but I find it easier to use metric (2mm).

The stock spec sucks. I can do +-.5mm with strings and ruler so there is no reason to be satisfied with +-2mm.

On my subies I personally run -1.5 camber( max possible stock) and as close as possible to 0 toe as possible. I have never gotten weird wear from using that spec.

PHeller wrote: AWD for snow (rarely drives it in snow) Classic case of "I bought it because I like them and they are fast." Although he has considered doing an auto-x with it eventually.

Oh, he's one of those guys.

Driven5 wrote: Being within factory spec doesn't necessarily mean anything. On some cars one wheel can have positive camber while the other has negative camber, and they're both still in spec. What were the actual alignment values? What is the factory spec range? Who knows, it might even be possible you could adjust to values that are still within factory spec, and it would be enough to correct the issue.

This. I know my old Mazdaspeed6 had something like a .25" allowance for total toe. That's a pretty wide range.

Don't go by factory tolerances, they're geared towards a balance of manufacturing efficiency/tire wear/perfomance. Mostly geared toward the first of those three criteria.

PHeller wrote:

Knurled wrote:

PHeller wrote: The inside of the tires are getting choppy after only a few thousand miles.

He drives like a little girl and does a lot of city driving. That's the tl;dr non-diplomatic explanation.

I can't say that. He may be watching.

Nose heavy small FWDs (or rather, FWDs with no weight at all on the back) were bad for this kind of wear. Rabbits, 80s Golfs, and the like were thr worst because they specified a lot of toe-in and negative camber in the rear. Apparently this kind of wear was called "old woman wear" in Germany because it was worst on little old ladies' cars.

It's getting to be somewhat prevalent again with AWD and rubber-band (non compliant) tires being more common. The cause, as best as I can figure, is that it's simply due to the tires hopping and scrubbing. Heavier cars are far less susceptible. Solution: Drive harder so that the tires wear more flat.

To recap, it's not really something you can tune out with alignment. Cross-rotate the tires more frequently, or replace the tires when the noise gets to be too annoying.