Fitch Autos has over 30 years experience offering great customer service, affordable pricing and a high level of service and expertise for your vehicle.
We want to keep the motorists in and around the Brownhills and Burntwood areas safe, and so we’re keen to share useful tips on how you can save money and maintain your vehicle to a high roadworthy standard. With this in mind, I thought I’d fill you in as to why it’s worth dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s when it comes to making sure your wheel alignment is spot on.
The majority of us only think about checking our vehicle’s wheel alignment when we have a serious issue with our steering. Not regularly checking that your wheels are aligned could be costing you in both the short and the long term.
The cost of a vehicle’s wheel alignment is a small price to pay when you compare it to the wealth of benefits it provides.
Save on Fuel
For a start, proper wheel alignment makes sure your tyres don’t wear out unevenly and earlier than they should. It also ensures you consume less fuel.
Both of these have a direct impact on your pocket. Take fuel consumption. It is estimated vehicles with incorrect wheel alignment suffer a fall in fuel efficiency of as much as 7%.
If you are a motorist who drives 15,000 miles a year, and your car is giving you on average 51 miles per gallon, when a gallon costs £5.27, by getting your wheel alignment sorted properly you will save almost £110 on the annual cost of the fuel you buy.
Save On Tyres
If your wheel alignment is incorrectly set, the result can be rapid and irregular tyre wear that can also affect the safety and handling of the vehicle. When tyres are incorrectly aligned, you will wear the rubber more quickly which could create handling errors. When tyres are misaligned, they will also wear out unevenly relative to each other.
If you also factor in the savings you will be making on not having to replace tyres before time, you will be saving many times what it would cost to pop to the garage to have your wheel alignment checked.
Interestingly, wheel alignment is in the top three causes of tyres wearing unevenly. The others are incorrect tyre pressures and mechanical part failures.
Wheel alignment can be knocked out of true by any impact on your wheels. This can be caused by simply driving over potholes, clipping kerbs, going over sleeping policemen and other speed slowing humps too quickly.
So, to run through the benefits of having your wheels aligned properly, you will find:
- The chances of having to buy tyre replacements are greatly diminished. The life of any tyre is limited, but with the help of wheel alignment, you can greatly increase a tyre’s life. It’s friction between the road and the rubber along with braking that wears a tyre out over time. Alignment keeps your tyres straight for longer periods, which enhances their overall life.
- There is less wear and tear on tyres, wheels and other connected components. Wheel alignment reduces the risks of wear and tear, saving money in the long term because you won’t need to visit the repair shop often.
- You will save on the cost of fuel because the efficiency of your car increases giving you better mileage.
- There will be a decreased chance of accidents, most of which are not caused by drivers, and are too often down to a faulty vehicle. Driving without wheel alignment automatically increases the chance of an accident, which can cost a lot of money to put right.
It’s worth keeping in mind that the cost of keeping your wheels correctly aligned is bound to be far less than the cost of replacing four tyres that wear out too soon. In our book, prevention is always a better option than a cure ? At Fitch Autos we have the very latest training and technology to ensure that your wheel alignment is correct. This not only saves you money but ensures your safety.
