Dealership says, "Looks Good To Me!"

After three alignments, truck drives great, but these guys cannot figure out how to center the damn steering wheel.



Service advisor said the techs are having trouble with it because my lift, tires, and spacers.

The lift, tires, and spacers...





I'd rather the dealership just tell me their tech sucks, rather than try and blame me for my extreme parts *eye roll*.

 

Extreme mods jokes aside thats a clean rig!

I dealt with this at the dealership as well- ended up pulling the wheel and adjusting it myself lol

 

Common denominator = "Dealership"
That is where your problems are.
I don't trust them to even do my free oil changes.

 

Pulling the wheel?

 

Thank you! Wife got me a detail for Christmas so this was a low key way to show her off haha

(Edit to add: Show off the truck, not the wife lol)

Facts, I called the local 4x4 shop and they told me not in so many words that they do a few dealership corrections a month. Kills me.

 

I just had our RAV4 aligned at the dealership and they made the exact same mistake. It's extremely annoying. It also took over two hours because they did a full vehicle inspection I didn't ask for. I hate going to the dealership.

 

I had the same issue, they finally ended up disconnecting the battery and reconnecting it back. And it went back to being straight. At least that’s what the manager told me after 3 attempts at alignment

 

I'm pretty sure techs could tell the advisor/manager that headlight fluid was low and the advisor would turn around and say with a straight face the same thing to the customer.

My guy told me that the reset the steering angle position sensor to fix it. Whatever they did, it didn't work.

 

Funny, my steering wheel just decided the other day to offset itself to the left just about as much as yours is. Drives me nuts. I have the factory 3" lift and was going to take it to the dealer to have an alignment done, but now I'm second-guessing that.

 

Highly recommend looking into a local shop that does trucks, especially lifted ones.

My truck had an alignment done by an actual shop after the lift. It was perfect. The most recent tomfoolery was due to a Prius hitting me and Toyota getting their mitts on it.

 

I haven't hit any curbs or big potholes that I can recall, so I'm wondering how the steering wheel just got off-center one day out of the blue.

 

Suspension components not torqued to spec, or not retorqued after settling can lead to alignment slipping out of spec.

 

I know. But the lift is factory-installed and hasn't been touched since Jan. 2024. I guess it's plausible one of the A-arm bolts has loosened just enough to let a bump knock it out of alignment.

 

What wheels, how wide, and what offset are those?

 

I use to be the alignment tech at my old job and had a couple customer come back for a "vehicle drives straight but steering wheel not centered" after I just did an alignment.

Couple things I did to get the alignment "correct"

1. Have customer center the steering wheel while the vehicle is on alignment rack. You'd be surprised what many people considered "centered" is different from one person to another.
2. Have the customer sit in vehicle the entire time especially on smaller vehicles. Sometimes the customer is on the heavier side and vehicle leans more when they get in it compared to me. Especially when they are 300lb in a Nissan Versa.

 

The wheels are OEM with a 1" spacer. Tires are 285/65/20's

My biggest issue isn't so much the tilt of the wheel, it's the center "dead zone" or the center of play.

The center of free play is offset to the left. I can put slight pressure on the right of the wheel to make it dead straight. If I put the same light pressure on the left side the wheel will be about 5ish degrees off.

 

That makes the overall offset about +30 which is the perfect offset, IMO. I wish they made a set of TRD pro wheels with that offset like they did for Tacomas. I could achieve similar, I suppose, by getting the spacers. And the 285s are exactly also what I want but my 18" OR wheels are only 7.5" wide and the Michelin 285s specify 8" minimum.

That steering wheel issue would drive me nuts. I had that once with some car and took it back and they fixed it. Depending on the PITA factor with taking it back you could pull the steering wheel and rotate it one or 2 splines. I have pulled the wheel on a car with airbags once upon a time for other repairs and it wasn't that hard. But I haven't done it on the Tundra.

 

I've dealt with something like this in the past, although in my case it was for a valve body separator plate.

After visiting them twice, I had it fixed on my own dime (fix was cheap). I then went to the dealership, spoke with the service manager and told him "Since your own techs couldn't figure out how to fix this....I had it done at the local shop. They knew how to fix it. Here's your own TSB on how to fix this; here's 15 pages of [insert F150 forum here] complaints; here's the part numbers; etc. Hopefully this will help."

A few hours later the dealership owner called me to apologize and refunded me (this was 15 or so years ago when people still did that kind of stuff). He tried to claim the 'A-list techs' (or whatever the hell they called them) were in short supply. I told them "That's fine. I'd rather wait then be told this isn't an issue when I'm the guy who makes 100% sure this IS an issue before I drive up and waste your time."

Never had any issues after that...but I'm betting nowadays dealerships are more petty. :/

 

The most common error in an alignment because it's the most noticeable. Your's is not as bad as I've seen. I will assume that that picture was on flat surface. If so, it's just a simple small tweak of the right and left tie rod adjustments. In this case, the steering wheel needs to be secured by locking it center level which looks to be a couple degrees to the right. Then, turn the tie rod adjustments on the left to slightly lengthen the tie rod and equally shorten the right tie rod. Then, of course, the road test, which most techs don't do.