2017 Prius 4 Touring Rear Camber Problem Fixed

My car is a 2017 Prius 4 Touring with the 17” wheels and now has 32,000 miles. I got the car with 3 miles and I let Toyota do the included Toyota Care maintenance for the first 25,000 miles. That included tire rotations every 5,000 miles. Every time I got the car back, the summary sheet said everything including the tires were fine. I did my first tire rotation at home at 30,000 miles and what I found out was that all four tires were wearing on the inside. The uneven wear was pretty obvious and any competent Toyota tech should have flagged it on my “Toyota Care” trip summary. However, this never happened. I have my own alignment tools so I started checking all four wheels. What I found out was that the rear wheels were at -2.4 and -3.3 camber. The fronts were at -0.2 and -0.6. Basically confirming that my rear camber was way out of spec. I took it to the Toyota dealership before my warranty ran out to take care of a peeling steering wheel and a rattling dash so I mentioned it to them. They quickly told me that I would have to pay for an alignment. I asked them how they planned to do an alignment for camber if there was no rear adjustment for it? The sales guy simply said that I probably had hit something and bent some suspension components. Needless to say, I didn’t buy his explanation and decided to fix it myself since I knew this is a common issue on the Gen 4 Prius.


I decided to go with the Godspeed AK-066-D rear upper adjustable control arm kit. This would allow me to adjust the rear camber and fix this Toyota engineering issue. The installation was pretty straight forward. I got the rear camber set at -0.5 degrees on both rear wheels without an issue. The quality of these parts are excellent and have no concern that they will perform with out issues for the life of the car. I just wanted to pass this information to any 2016-2020 Prius owners out there that may be seeing similar issues. The only real solution to this problem is to go with aftermarket rear upper adjustable control arms. I paid $157 shipped and did my own installation and alignment so I didn’t have to pay 2-3 times more at the dealership for them to tell me the rear wheels were now “within specs” and continue to have the internal wear that will ruin tires at 30,000 miles.


I am attaching a couple of pictures I took after the installation. Note that none of my rear suspension components were bent or damaged. I’ve never hit any potholes or ran over any road debris. All my driving is on fairly new freeways so it was no surprise to me that the real issue was due to a Toyota engineering design flaw.

 

Just another quick update. I forgot to mention that the rear tires I rotated to the front also had a little bit of cupping on the inside of them. I attributed this to the slight positive toe on the rears(about 0.125” if I had to guess based on visual inspection from my string line coming from the front wheel) in addition to the camber issue. Surprisingly, this positive toe practically went away once I adjusted the rear camber(0.020” estimated).

Immediately after I rotated the tires, I began to hear the terrible tire noise coming from the front tires. At the beginning, I thought there was a lifted truck with off-road tires riding next to me on the freeway. However, I soon realized it was my tires that were making that noise. After commuting now for approximately 350 miles, I am happy to report that the road noise coming from the front tires has been reduced to about 25-30% of the initial road noise I heard on day one after the tire rotation. This is promising and I hope the noise eventually goes away with more miles.

I guess I’ll be investing I some toe plates next. The string method takes up too much time to setup just to do a quick toe check.

 

Cool! Thanks for providing Toyota’s factory specs.

 

Cool! I just hope to get another 20,000 miles out of these tires. I have the Yokohama BluEarth S34 215/45R17 tires, but I have not found out how many miles they are rated for.

 

Although you may need new shocks and coils, you’ll still need aftermarket adjustable upper control arms if you want to fix the camber issue. I highly doubt the new parts quoted will fix the root cause of the alignment issue.