Ok, so I recently got a flat tire and my tire had to be replaced....they put a brand new Fusion ZRI on it, which I suppose is a good tire (Any opinions?), but they only replaced that one, and it's a different width then all the rest of the tires...is this going to cause a huge problem? or just going to cause the car's allignment to be messed up?

 

What do you mean "they only replaced that one"? Is it a rental or did you mean to say you only replaced that one?

And yes it is a huge problem.

 

They only replaced one, didn't really give me the option to get more tires, when I asked what type of a problem that would cause they just said it would be fine so pretty much the end of night rush to get the customer out so they can go home, but i know to think, so i figured I'd ask the board, but at the time I didn't know the size difference of the tire, I just knew they were going to have different thread. I got back to my car one day and noticed the difference in width, it's pretty obvious. I thought they would have the common sense to use the same specs as the other tires.

But anyways.

What problems can I expect?

 

Handling will go to hell & you could ruin your difs.

 

Oh, that sounds delightful...I'll get over there this weekend and see what they'll do about it. Thank you.

 

Yup ... if the tires are too different the diffs will work overtime to balance the different wheel speeds and that can kill them.

I had a similar situation ... I was getting all of my tires replaced and the shop couldn't get to the last one before they closed. They said I could bring the car back the next day and they'd finish. I told them I couldn't drive the car with one tire having that much wear since it could damage the diffs. they were nice and stored it for me inside and I picked it up the next day.

Sadly, a lot of these places don't know that it's a problem on AWD vehicles.

 

Hopefully mine's alright, it took me a few days to figure out they were different.