Specifically, new tires in the front, tie rod ends, and an alignment in addition to some body work.
I was out of state for 2 months and did not drive the car during that time.
Since then, I have driven on the ice and snow which just recently started to melt away, and I noticed that both tires (new) are bare on the outer edges, but full tread toward the inner edges.
I took a longer harder look, and with the car sitting on the pavement, I could see that the front tires formed a "V"; both of them tilted away from the car on top, toward the car on the bottom.
Despite this, the car drives in a straight line with hands off the steering wheel (both tires off the same amount in opposite directions?) although it is very noisy whenever I hit a bump in the road.
I took the car back to the repair shop that did the repairs in September, and they told me that the rack/pinion was bad, and that they didn't check that when they did the initial repairs.
Now they are telling me that they will have to replace about $500 worth of 'stuff', plus labor, at my expense, in addition to charging me for another alignment, and they need to replace the tires as well.
The owner of the shop told me that the alignment was off "four degrees", and that he had never seen an alignment off this far ever before. I am not sure what that actually means.
I feel that they should have noticed this when they did the initial repair and had it covered under the insurance claim.
Now, however, they had already done an alignment before the insurance claims adjuster looked at the car, and insurance is refusing to cover the cost of the tires (which is the ONLY thing the repair shop submitted.), claiming that tire wear due to a bad alignment is simple maintenance and not covered by my policy.
My question is this... Should the rack/pinion have been looked at during the course of the repairs in September, or is that something that is easy to overlook?
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Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 AT 6:38 PM
