Pontiac Bonneville Tires and Wheels

jim237

I have a 2000 Bonnie SSEI with 36,000 miles with 17" factory chrome wheels. Recently I purchased new Pirelli P Zero's from Discount tire Co. I have had the car back in two times because the tire's are not balanced correctly. The second time the tire buster said these wheels were made to have the wheel weights mounted on the inside, not the outside,because of looks. He said if we place the weights on both sides, that should solve the problem, so I watched as they did just that, but I still have a vibration at highway speeds. I did not have this problem when I removed the old Goodyear Eagles. Has anyone else experienced a simular problem??

imidazol97

You have a car which shows imperfection in the tire/wheel assembly if it does not roll round under load of the car's weight. It may require Hunter Road Force balancing which presses the wheel against another wheel as it measures the out of balance amount.

The local Discount Tire has those balancers. You can find who has them at

Locate Hunter 9700 balancer

There were TSBs issued about fixing the problem of feeling the imperfections of the tires on the H bodes (and G and A bodies). One method was using Michelin tires. They are round and roll more round under load than most others. The tires you bought may be slightly imperfect in rolling round when crushed. You can read about it here

Hunter 9700 explained
Hunter.com

Here's a link to a discussion bout vibration in 03 on Edmunds. You might want to scan through posts before and after the one I link. You might ask for advice in that Bonneville discussion. The host will probably move this new thread to another location, and it may end up there.

My dealer had a Hunter 9700 when I bought our 03 leSabre in Dec. 02. I bought it because it had Michelin Symmetry tires on 16 inch chrome rims. The Hunter fixed it ALONG with trimming up the alignment. Alignment is CRITICAL. Because I could feel a slight vibration pulling up long grades on new pavement on I65 in TN but not when the motor wasn't pulling harder, my service manager thought the front alignment was off. Turns out the rear toe-in was slightly off. I think they trimmed up the toe on the front but it actually was at optimum already.

First place to check is your tires. One or more is less than perfect. The Michelin Symmetrys I had rated at 12 ounces, 9,8, and 6 in whatever unit of measure the Hunter 9700 uses for how much force is generated by the tire not rolling round.

On one of my visits, Goodyear tires were being balanced for another car. They were new and they were up around 20 units of force. Michelins are good. I just put Harmonys on my 03 now and have only slight out-of-balance which I think will be gone when the store rebalances at 5000 miles. I won't need Hunter balancing. Another store in their chain has Hunter 9700 or I will go back to the dealer if I need Hunter balancing.

kts0347

Hi,
I have a 2002 Bonneville SSEI with 17 inch chromes (factory) and have always had wheel balance problems. I have the wheels road force balanced frequently, and that clears up the problem, but after a few thousand miles it is right back again. The suspension is quite sensitive, and force balancing is the only solution. I agree that the Michelins are the best running tire on this car. I tried a set of Kuhmo's but they were just too harsh and vibrated. The factory Goodyears did too.

imidazol97

Have you tried marking the rims and tires with an adjacent dot of something to see if the tires are moving around the rim?

kts0347

Hi,

Yes, the tire store got so fed up with seeing me come back for repeated road-force balancing, that they marked the rims as you said. Tires were not rotating on the rims. Either the car is very sensitive to road force, or my butt is, one of the two is a certainty. After 90K miles, I have basically become immune to it.

matttt

I had bad vibration problems after getting a set of P Zeros for my 2003 SSEI. No problems before the new tires. Had them rebalanced and still had vibrations that were cyclical in nature, ie coming and going at a constant speed. Tire rack replaced two tires and paid for another rebalancing. However problem returned. I finally had enough of the lousey ride and bought a new set of General Altimax HP. Car now rides better than new.