I took my wife’s Protégé 5 to the shop because the front driver side tire was extremely worn. Problem was we set it up for alignment and the numbers were in spec.! We looked at the air pressure, suspension links and any possible contact areas but they were all good. WTF can be causing wear like this? The pictures are all form the same tire. Wear is not the same around the circumference of the tire and it’s all in the inside edge. Any clues will be helpful. I want to keep my wife and daughter safe but I don’t want to buy new tires until I can at least have an idea what’s causing this.
TIA

 

Is the car lowered? That's the kind of wear you would expect.

 

Tire out of balance ???

Otherwise gotta go with Gary on this...a lot of alignment shops are looking for factory specs, and not accounting for the car being lowered...

Either that or defective tire....

 

Nope it's 100% stock.

 

Not lowered but I'm hearing "defective tire" a lot. My problem is I haven't seen any defective tire wear to assure myself it's a plausible explanation

 

A tire out of balance can wear like that though...and it wont show up on an alignment

 

I seriously doubt that it would be out of balance. They are on the front and I would have felt the vibration.
After thinking about it a bit it occured to my that maybe it was driven for a while at low pressure and that damaged the internal plys. Now that it's properly inflated the tread in the middle is "weak" and the contact patch has shifted to the edge.

 

well rotate the tire out even replace it, then if you notice the wear happeniing on the new or rotated tire then take it to mazda and they will figure it out. But to be honest, that is a strange warping tire wear

 

Unless someone is parking on a alot of 45-90degree curbs to much, or just plain hitting alot of curbs... Wear that bad is something near being broken on the suspension/steering somewhere.

 

low pressure would have done it, but on the inner and outer edges of the tire... that's pretty low pressure though - suprised you wouldn't have dents all over your rim and had the tire roll off around a corner.

 

Ive seen a tire go to **** like that after standing on the brakes one good time. Flat spot it and then it never rides right again.

 

I used to work in a tire shop years ago. And the only time I ever saw wear like that was when there was a problem with the toe adjustment. I would take it to another shop for a second opinion, just to be sure. Have them look for something bent or broken.