Your car's performance on the road depends on several factors, including the many sets of critical angles that make up your wheel alignment. Wheel alignment refers to your suspension and steering geometry, and it can have a drastic impact on your car's handling and reliability. Improper alignment can wear out your tires or affect your car's handling in a few dangerous ways.

While wheel geometry includes several angles, this article will focus on the concept of front and rear toe alignment. These angles can significantly impact tire wear and steering responsiveness, so it's worth understanding a bit about them and learning to recognize any signs of trouble.

Understanding Toe Angles

Despite the unusual-sounding name, toe angle isn't a challenging concept to understand. Toe refers to the angle of the wheels relative to the direction of the car's travel. Toe-in (often referred to as positive toe) means that the fronts of your wheels point inwards towards the vehicle's center. Toe-out (or negative toe) refers to the opposite condition: your wheels point outward, away from the vehicle's center.

There's no advantage to an incorrectly aligned toe angle. Your manufacturer sets this angle to provide optimum performance, and you'll always have the best combination of handling and tire wear by sticking with what the manufacturer has decided. Unfortunately, your vehicle's geometry rarely remains static, and toe angles can drift over time.

Since toe angle and steering are closely related, toe-related alignment issues usually stem from worn steering components. These parts aren't necessarily failing, but they can allow for some alignment "drift" as they age. Rough streets or encounters with potholes can cause your toe angles to move out of alignment even more quickly.

Recognizing the Signs of Trouble

While wheel alignment diagrams tend to exaggerate the appearance of toe alignment problems, the reality is that misaligned wheels are often too subtle to spot with the naked eye. However, relatively small changes in the angles of your wheels can have an outsized impact on your vehicle performance. The sooner you recognize the signs that something is wrong, the less likely you are to damage your car.

Alignment issues tend to produce unusual handling behavior, including tracking with ruts in the road or pulling the car to one side or the other. You may also notice loose or vague-feeling steering. If you experience these symptoms, check your tires for unusual signs of wear. In the case of a misaligned toe angle, you'll usually notice excessive wear on the inside or outside edge.

Driving a car with poor alignment can rapidly destroy your tires, and it can also lead to unstable, and sometimes hazardous, handling characteristics. If it's been more than a year since your last alignment, or you notice any driveability issues, don't hesitate to schedule a wheel alignment service as soon as you can.