Rear trailing arm bushings causing tire wear?
 

I recently put on a set of Miro Type 398 18x9.5 +24 all around with 245/40 on my car. They are new to me and came with some michelin pilot super sports that have only 5/32 left on them, figured i'd just drive on them till they're completely gone then get a new set of tires. Yesterday I took my rear wheels off to roll my fenders and noticed that the tires are wearing on the inside which is odd to me because i didn't change any suspension and my stock wheels/ tires have always worn perfectly. So been doing some research and read on a different forum that if your alignment is in spec(which i think mine is, nothing should have changed) that worn out trailing arm bushings can cause your toe to vary while driving and thus result in inside tire wear. That same post also mentioned that another sign of worn bushings is that your rear end will want to jump/fidget more when going over bumps/potholes and such. I've noticed my car does that with these wheels on as well, i just chalked it up to the different wheels... Has anyone heard of this before? Not much information on here about bushings... thanks for any feedback!

It's possible, but are you sure the wear isn't from the previous owner? They're used tires, and you say everything started when you put on these tires.

You can examine the bushing and check for looseness, it's simple and free.

I'm fairly certain the wear isn't from the previous owner, I inspected them before putting them on and don't remember seeing any inside wearing. Then again I could've just overlooked it. I'll inspect my bushings over the weekend. I haven't ever looked at them because my car only has 64k on it even though it's an 07'. If the bushings are bad I've read that Whiteline is the way to go, is an alignment needed after replacing bushings?

Stock bushings are fine. If you want to get fancy you can certainly go with a firmer aftermarket one, but unless you're racing it's a very minor change. I haven't done that one in particular, but some of them are a pain in the ass. So it may be faster/cheaper/easier to replace the whole arm with the built in bushing.

But I would check the alignment first. You'll need one after.

Also it's HIGHLY unlikely that both rear bushings would have failed in the same way at the same time. Does the same wear appear on both sides? Because that would indicate this is from the previous owner or a symmetric alignment problem.

You could also swap the front tires to the rear and see if they wear similarly.

good point about how unlikely it is for both of them to fail at the same time, and since the inside wear is happening on both sides you are probably right that it was wear from the previous owner. I'm going to shake everything down and inspect the bushings tonight so we'll see what i find.

I'm probably going to put my winter wheels back on just because we're having some crazy weather here in Utah, random blizzard snow storms ha.

So i got my car in the air and using a small crowbar i checked all the bushings for play. I could fairly easily make the arm end move back and forth but it would always go back to center, i took this to mean that it was still connected to the bushing. Visually I did see some small cracks and one of the bushings looked like it might be separating from the center.

All in all i don't think it's my bushings that are the problem. I also looked at the wear pattern on the front tires and noticed they have an identical wear pattern so for now I'm going to conclude that the bad wear pattern is a result of the tires being used on the previous owners car. However when i do put new tires on i will be getting my alignment checked just to insure that it is correct.

Thanks for your input Loki!

The offset of these rims is also about an inch wider than stock with slightly different rolling diameters and about an inch wider tires. Although probably minor, this will change the geometry of your suspension a bit as well. Chances are you just need to re-align with the new wheels.