Why Does My Car Pull to One Side?

Why does my car pull to one side? Welcome to Mercie J where compassion and craftsmanship come together. I'm Rick Smith.

So first of all, let's make sure we determine that it's actually a pull. So if you let go of your steering wheel and let the car just drive itself, and it drifts to one side or the other then that's what we would call a pull.

If you're holding the steering wheel and the car pulls, it may just be a steering wheel off-center, so make sure that it's not just the steering wheel’s off center, but the car is actually pulling. So if it's actually pulling the most common thing that we see is actually tire rolling resistance. So there's some sort of internal issue with the tires.

Fairly easy to evaluate, we simply take the 2 front tires and cross them from side to side. If the pull changes then we know it’s caused by the tires. Secondly, we need to do a really good thorough suspension inspection because perhaps we have a suspension component that is either worn and it's shifted a little bit, or maybe even it's bent or something like that.

So a suspension part like control arms and things like that can cause a drift or a pull as well. And then the last thing we look at is we look at the alignment. If the alignment is off, then we can adjust it and and then we can straighten it out the 2 kinds of things that cause pulling or drifting are caster, which is something you can't physically see, and camber, which you can't fully see by the eye either but a machine can.

So imagine that we have this tire in and this tire straight it’s gonna to want to go this way. But casters are kind of like the wheels on your office chair. Where they turn and follow what you're trying to do and that you can't physically see we have to take that up on a machine. The last thing I just want to point out is in all cases we want to make sure that the tire pressure is set properly because if it's uneven, it can cause a car to drift as well.

So I hope this has been informational to you and until next time, safe travels and blessings to you.

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