I enjoy Costco. I feel like the money I put into a Costco membership I get back in affordable bulk items, conspicuously cheap hot dogs, and discounted services like the store’s tire shop.
I do not feel the same about my 2016 Subaru Forester, as I already explained in a recent article. The pleasure I derive from Costco collided with the resentment I feel towards my Subaru today when I took my car to Costco to get the tires rotated.
It runs out I’ve found another way for my Forester to disappoint me.
This Should Have Been An Easy Day
In that last article, I noted that the car tends to eat headlight bulbs, lower control arms, wheel bearings, and tires. In fact, since writing that story I had to replace another headlight. This is a car I bought new less than a decade ago and I’ve lost count of the number of headlights I’ve needed.
Given I got decent life and great performance out of my Michelin CrossClimate 2 tires I went ahead and got the same set, but rather than have to deal with Subaru anymore, I got the tires from Costco.
Not only did I get a good price, but if you take care of proper tire maintenance Costco offers a great 5-year road hazard warranty. Subaru only offers a 2-year warranty and, the last time I had to use it, I had to wait a while for new tires because I didn’t go with the OEM tire.
In order to stay in the good graces of the Costco road hazard warranty, the plan this morning was to take it over to my local store, do a call, and grab a hot dog while they did the rotation.
Before I could get the hot dog or even finish the call I got paged to the tire shop. Oh no…
Yet Another Weird Subaru Thing
Three wheels were on the ground, but the front passenger side tire was still meekly hanging there. A litany of potential problems ran through my mind: worn struts wearing out one side? Obvious Subaru alignment problems?
Nope, one of the lug nuts was stuck and the tech nicely explained that removing it was likely to snap it off.
Having never experienced this I was curious, is this a Subaru issue?
“Oh, yeah, it’s always Subarus. We see this all the time,” a tech explained.
Why?
“The thread pitch is too narrow,” said another.
The thread pitch is the space in between the threads and, alas, Subaru does use a 1.25 mm pitch, versus 1.5 mm for Toyota, for instance. I also sense that the quality of steel might be an issue, but I haven’t done a metallurgical comparison so I can’t say for sure.
I contemplated having them just crack it off and fix it later. I’ve driven a McLaren with two missing lug nuts, a Subaru missing one seemed pretty easy and it’s something I can deal with later.
Then I thought about my last article and decided that if anyone was going to break it off it was going to be me, dammit. It’s a $4.00 part, so I wasn’t sweating the damage (actually, it turns it’s a $2.00 part).
The manager of the tire shop saw me taking pictures and I explained what I do for a living and he confided in me a little more. Not only do they crack Subaru studs all the time, people don’t believe them.
These are relatively new cars and customers often get the rotations done at the dealership for the original tires because of service deals, warranty reasons, et cetera.
“I take the wheels off and show them where the dealership service techs have just replaced the studs without telling them,” he tells me.
Classic Subaru.
I thanked them and then drove home to see if, indeed, this would snap if I tried a low-power solution (my arm and the wrench that came with the car).
I put light pressure on the lugnut and it doesn’t budge. I put slightly more arm into it and they snapped like Queen under pressure.
Dammit.
How Common Is This?
Just to make sure I wasn’t losing my mind I checked around to see if this was a common complaint. It turns out this is a well-known issue and there are plenty of threads about it on the web.
I went a step further and asked Bozi, because Bozi wrote about how much he loves his Subaru and how little trouble it gave him.
“I actually ended up buying like a pack of studs after I snapped the third one on my WRX doing a rotation,” Bozi told me. “Fortunately, the studs are cheap.”
He even provided a photo:
Other Subaru owners I talked to said this also happened to them.
It’s Not A Big Deal, But It’s Annoying
I keep thinking back to my high-mileage Volvo, which had over 200,000 miles of tire rotations, including the ones I did myself. Did I ever snap a stud? No. Do I ever remember seeing a stud that seemed newer? Nope.
This isn’t a huge deal. It’s an easy fix and either one I’ll do myself or, honestly, I’ll probably toss a few bucks to my mechanic and he’ll do it for me.
It’s just another thing in a long list of things about this car that feels cheaply made or under-engineered. I just wanted to rotate my tires, it shouldn’t result in having to do more work. I’m used to breaking things while fixing them on my project cars, not on the car that’s supposed to be the thoughtless daily driver.
Also, it’s worth noting that for all of his Subaru love, the next new car that Bozi bought was a Toyota.
Just saying!
