You ever hear the story about the blind men and the elephant? Your inditement of independents looks from my end of the elephant like you were a poor judge of what independent specialist to take it to. Every good alignment is done by a qualified tech. The equipment is irrelevant.

I would say that chances are good that every dealership has someone that can align your car. If you get him you did good. If not, well the tooling won't help.

The last alignment machine I bought I attended a demo of a piece of equipment at the local Ford dealer. The "normal" guy was sick and the helper guy was doing alignments. The SA was parking the cars on the lift he was aligning them and the SA was parking the finished products. I sat there and watched a by the book POS alignment that wasn't driven first and wasn't driven last. The readings were brought from where ever they were red to the first place they turned green (red and green denote readings in and out of spec).

A real alignment tech drives the car, figures the needed corrections, measures the car, relates the needs to the actual values , changes the readings (adjusts) to suit both the cars actual needs and to meet its prescribed tolerances, and then drives the car to evaluate his decisions.

See, unlike the rest of the car, aligning a car is still an abstract science. Alignment is the last thing that can be "tuned" about the modern car. The machine can tell one what should happen and a real tech then works within the standards to achieve the result required..... or knows the reason why NOT!

The last place you should take your car to get it aligned is someplace that doesn't do alignments. I do alignments for about 15 shops and they bring me everything. I was sitting on hold waiting to inform a single car line specialty shop (Asian car) about his car I was aligning this week when I heard his caller on hold message discuss his shop. I couldn't believe it when one of his advertised services was alignments. I guess he feels pretty confident in his capabilities.

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Steve Brotherton
Continental Imports
Gainesville FL
Bosch Master, ASE Master, L1
33 years MB technician