alright, i'm not exactly sure how this happens or why... but the inner tread of the tires on my mother's GMC Envoy (big suv) keeps wearing out quickly while the rest of the tire has about 50%+ tread life left. this is the same exact thing that happened with my 1996 ford explorer with all of those tire crashes. is there a reason why these tires are doing this? i think it is just a little bit odd as to why the inner tire would be doing this. the tires have always been properly inflated and the vehicle doesn't pull any excessive weight, just the driver.

thanks in advance!

 

Typically wear on the inside edge only points to a camber problem. Has it been aligned recently? Some of the independent front suspension designs on 4wd vehicles have the tire swinging through an arc rather than staying square to the pavement, so depending on where the nominal ride height is set, you could have the tire biased to the inside edge of the tread.

I've found that you must rotate the tires on big trucks/SUV's every 6,000 miles religiously in order to get proper life out of the tread.

Fronts go to the rear, and the rears criss-cross to the fronts. This makes sure that each tire has seen wear at each corner of the vehicle after 24,000 miles. Following this you should get an easy 48,000 out of the tires. (I got 58,000 out of a set of BFG AT KO's.)

I highly recommend that tire (in fact I have some with 7,000 miles on 16x8 wheels for sale if you know anyone looking)

 

Toe out will cause that problem as well.

When I rotate, I do similar, except I do rears to front, the fronts crisscrossed to rear. My thinking was not to introduce opposite rotation AND opposite side to the fronts at the same time, let the rears break-in the new rotation. Not sure which is better, but that was my logic behind it.

Mark in MA

 

Toe out problems typically also feather the tread blocks in addition to the excessive inside wear. (side-loading occurs on the tread blocks due to the tires not rolling straight down the road)

Your rotation would probably be better for FWD cars, I was referring to RWD trucks (non-directional tread of-course)

 

thanks for the help... the car is religiously re-aligned once a year by a buddy of my dad's at a tire store. the problem that i can see, in which you have mentioned, is that the tires are rotated maybe every 10k miles. never thought of that as too much of a problem, but i'll have to start rotating them for my mom every 6k and see if that helps any. thanks again!

 

Lack of rotation alone will not cause uneven treadwear like that, there is something in the alignment that is causing it. Years ago I had an old jeep with severe wear on the insides. Twice I took it to alignment shops who both said there were no alignment issues. I finally did the tape-measure alignment and found significant toe-out, adjusted it myself to just slightly toe-in and it was fine after that. I have no clue what those alignment shops were smokin'.

My ex-wife went 95,000 miles on her original tires on her '91 Explorer, so I know Explorers are capable of proper alignment. (I probably rotated the tires maybe every 20k...it wasn't very often).

Mark in MA

 

Lack of rotation won't cause wear like that, but frequent rotation will help to spread out uneven wear amongst all 4 tires thus maximizing the tire life regardless of the alignment. I agree that the root cause seems to be some kind of alignment issue.

They should be able to produce a print-out of the measurements when they do your alignment. I'd ask for a copy next time you get it done.

I've had highly recommended shops screw me and turn out to be not so great.

 

i'm having the vehicle go in for an alignment next week... i'll get that printout from them! thanks again

 

I would seriously reconider his skills at either aligning a vehicle or his equipment.

My stepdad has a Dakota and NEVER rotates the tires at now 150K miles. He replaced them at 100K. *finally* He has never had an alignment done either.

 

maybe they do not align while the car is under it's own weight which may be minimum for most cars and be a heavy hitter for SUVs, Trucks, and etc. I've often heard there are ways to align both on, and off the weight for the car. they were just going by factory wheel positions alone, not good enough for such a heavy vehicle.