I've recently had quite the "experience" with the rear tires on my 2004 TL; the outer half of the tires were wore out after only 13,000 miles. After a little research on this site, I discovered the cause of my premature tire wear was a factory rear alignment setting that just didn't like having the 4 people in my carpool aboard. Apparently the factory setting was meant for a lightly loaded vehicle to provide the best possible handling. The thread also mentioned that Acura was aware of this and had a new alignment setting that would work when the car was more heavily loaded.

Well it was time to call the dealership and see about getting this resolved. I mentioned the above to the service rep and was told that they had replaced some customer’s tires with this same problem after as little as 6,000 miles. I figured good, it sounds like I’ll get taken care of, I expected the car to be re-aligned and at the very least some kind of pro-rating on the tires.

Well the dealership leaves me a voice mail the next day that each tire will be $208 plus the cost of the alignment. I’m thinking you’ve got to be kidding $500 to get this fixed, unacceptable!! So I call the dealer back, they tell me the alignment is only covered for 1 year or 12,000 miles and asked me if I had hit a pothole. I told them don’t you think the front-end alignment would have been shot also, the front tires were fine, and even if I had hit something it would have affected only one of the rear tires, not both.

This is when the dealership told me to call Acura’s client services line to dispute the whole manner. I’m thinking, oh boy is this going to be fun!! I get on the phone with Acura and explain the whole deal, they tell me to expect a resolution within 48 hours. Well the 48 hours passes and I haven’t heard a thing from Acura, so I call the dealership, of course they put it back on me to call Acura again and see where things stood. Well I call Acura and ask, hey 48 hours has passed any word on my case, I’m told the person working on my case is sick, try again tomorrow. Well luckily by the 4th day an Acura Factory rep happened to be visiting the dealership and things got straightened out. Final outcome, they realigned the car and put 2 new tires on free of charge!! Oh and by the way I didn’t hear back from Acura until the 5th day!!

 

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