[revjpeterson]

With radial tires the front tires will wear faster at the shoulders and the rear tires faster in the middle of the tread. This is the nature of vehicle suspensions. To counter this tendency you must rotate your tires. GM recommends every 7,500. I recommend every 5,000 based on personal experience. If you see any other type of uneven wear get an alignment. Also get an alignment immediately after purchasing new tires.

I know of one exception to this - the rear tires on several GM models will see severe wear on the inner shoulder under the stock alignment. The most prominent models for this were some recent W-platform (Impala, Grand Prix, etc.) vehicles. They set the rear camber so severely (3 degrees if I remember correctly) on these vehicles that you can see it when you're driving behind an unmodified vehicle. I had a set of Firestones on my Grand Prix that were pretty much junk after being left on the rear of the vehicle for 15,000 miles (after 23,000 total miles on a 55,000 mile tire) because the inner shoulder was so badly cupped (front tires easily had another 35,000 left in them). Ever since, I have my tire guy install a camber bolt kit when installing my first set of tires to bring them back within a degree of vertical.

From what I have seen of our Cruze (at least my Diesel), it looks like GM used a similar rear camber setup. If anyone has had their Cruze on an alignment rig and seen the rear camber numbers, I would like to see what they are stock (maybe I'll start another thread for that), but to me it looks like they're at least 2 degrees, and maybe more. I guess I don't mind, because it will help me burn through these OEM Goodyears faster so I can put a better tire on next fall, but when I do it looks like a camber bolt kit is in my future again.

 

[revjpeterson]

I've seen cars like this and I don't think the Cruze has this issue. If it did it would have been reported by now.

Good to know. I was hoping the apparent angle was just an optical illusion created by the body lines. It's just so hard to tell without a numerical measurement.