My car seems to have a lot of vibration at highway speed in the steering wheel.
About 3 weeks ago I had the tires rotated for the 1st time at 20k miles on the car.

The dealer asked if I wanted to balance the tires. I thought this was a way to jack up the bill because the tires are balanced from the factory to the rim, so I did not do it. I thought why would you need to re-balance when you move the tire, they are not balanced to the placement on the car.

Could this be why my steering wheel has a lot of vibration now? Was my logic about the balance all wrong?

Thanks

 

you're assumption is correct. once the wheels and tires are balanced, they should stay relatively balanced unless you hit something or have something with a good amount of weight stuck on them.

first thing i'd check would be to make sure they torqued the wheels down properly. you have to jack up the car and check each lug on each wheel. i would also check the tires and wheels to see if you have anything stuck on them that shouldn't be there. if those 2 don't seem to fix your problem, then i'd go get you wheels balanced again. your dealer could have taken a weight off to teach you a lesson about being too smart to be scammed..

 

everytime we had our tires rotated we have them balanced. we request it be done. the original oem michelin tires lasted 74,000 miles thanks to that and also making sure they had the proper tire pressure. The only time we had an allignment was when we bought new tires. sounds like your tires need to be balanced.

 

Do you have directional tires? If yes and you have them mounted to run the wrong direction then you will observe vibrations at higher speeds.

 

74xxx miles in michelins?! That's impressive but not likely from just balancing them.

Sometimes weights do come off and you wouldn't have felt it in the rear...check lugs
...check tire issue.hopefully it is not a bent rim.if problem persists I would recommend you swap back and just prepare too buy 2 new tires a little sooner.first though get a road force balancer from a shop that knows what they are doing

 

Now have Yokohama Avids V4s tires with 41,000+ miles on them so far. They still have alot of thread left. Not very happy with them but live and learn.

 

You must drive VERY relaxed...I think I do but my tires rarely last more than 20-30K.