I did a quick survey this week. I asked a number of customers in what situations they would consider a wheel alignment necessary. All but one said “tyre wear”.

They’re right. You start racking up some kms, then notice your tyres are wearing unevenly. Most often the left hand (passenger) side. Sometimes you put it down to cheap tyres and get some better ones, but the same problem occurs again. Depending on your suspension, you might resign yourself to this being a fact of caravan ownership. But it’s not. No matter what type of suspension you have (independent or beam axle), we can do a full laser alignment to get your wheels aligned properly. Normally, this will dramatically improve tyre life. And its something we recommend even on brand new vans – because they are normally NOT aligned at the factory.

But what did the other person say? It was “safety“, and its SO much more important than tyre wear.

When you look at the engineering that goes into a motor vehicle, there is a massive development effort focused on how the vehicle handles in all sorts of different conditions – hard braking, accelerating, heavy cornering, with high load, loose/slippery surfaces etc. Much of this handling is affected by the wheel orientation with things like camber, toe-in/toe-out, spring & dampening rates.

These properties apply in exactly the same way to your caravan, and have a massive determination on how SAFE your van is, and how it FEELS on the road (or off-road). So while your tyre tread is very important, its more important to have as large an area of rubber contacting the ground as possible in all situations. And to do this, you need your wheels properly aligned.

So, if you’ve never had your wheels aligned, or your suspect something may not be as good as it could be – talk to us about a caravan wheel alignment.