excessive inside rear tire wear

[headyardrat]

I have a 05 Z4 3.0 with 14,000 miles.Not suprised to see rear tires tread bare,but they wore from the inside edge out.Dealer seemed only interested in selling new rubber,no help in explaining reason for uneven wear.Any info out there? Yes they were RFT's.

headyardrat

[rje]

It has to be alignment. Have it checked. Strange the dealer didn't think about that since everytime there is improper tread wear whether inner (toe in) or outer (toe out), the first thing to check is the alignment.

[GP20]

For the Z4, the inner sides of the tires are supposed to wear out quicker because of the camber set-ups. You'll find this true on pretty much all the performance cars nowadays. 14,000 miles is about how long RFT's and about how long most perofrmance tires would last. I mean, this is not a Toyota that uses cheap tires that would last 30K miles.

The only way you'll get absolutely even wear after 14K miles is if you have an absolutely neutral camber setting, in which case your handling/cornering performance will suffer. So I'm not sure why anyone would want to do that on their Z4.

If you need to replace your tires, just replace them with non-RFT's this time around. You can do a search in the forum and find many benefits of non-RFT's with much better ride comfort being the biggest of them.

[VoiD]

drive harder

[headyardrat]

Thank you for the info,never had a sports car before .

[MMMazing07]

BMWs get negative camber from the dealerships so you dont crash

[RussRamz]

Originally Posted by MMMazing07

BMWs get negative camber from the dealerships so you dont crash

This is true for the rear wheels. Typical setups on ALL cars these days involve little or no camber in the front and 1 to 1.5 degrees of rear camber. This makes the car understeer which is much 'safer' than an oversteering car. More negative camber in the rear means the inside will wear quicker. It's all perfectly normal.

[Hawkeye]

Weird... on my car I have 18K on the clock and quite a bit of tread left... and I don't notice significantly more wear on the inside of the rears. I don't suppose it would matter that most of my driving is highway would it?

[headyardrat]

Most of my driving is on secondary road with lots of turns.Speed limits of 70kph but I run in the 150 kph range.

[jlstyle]

Symptom is normal but it can't be too different from inside and outside, otherwise I would recommend a good alignment. Nitrogen injection instead of air would help a little too.

[headyardrat]

Alingment complete,adjustment required,tech says I should see less severe inside wear ,but will still see inside wear due to camber.Went to independent tire shop not dealer.Thanking you all for the help.

[ZStig]

Originally Posted by jlstyle

. Nitrogen injection instead of air would help a little too.

lol

[TomC]

Originally Posted by headyardrat

I have a 05 Z4 3.0 with 14,000 miles.Not suprised to see rear tires tread bare,but they wore from the inside edge out.Dealer seemed only interested in selling new rubber,no help in explaining reason for uneven wear.Any info out there? Yes they were RFT's.

headyardrat

I'd buy OEM replacements from Tire Rack and find out who is an approved installer in your area and have them shipped to them ( it might be your dealer). It might be that they wenot properly balanced. Did you rotate them every 5K? It really helps. The run-flats are maxed at 15K to 20K if you drive your car as it was designed to drive. The passenger side was probably slightly worse then the driver side. I think your problem is not alignment, just balancing & not rotating them (L to R) TomC