The impact does not stop at the wheel
This is the single most useful thing to understand about running a car here.
A hard pothole strike is a large, sharp, one-directional load. The wheel takes it first, and a bent rim is the visible casualty — it holds air, it looks fine, and it produces a vibration that survives every rebalance because balance was never the problem.
But the energy carries on:
- The wheel bearing. The races take small indentations at the points the balls were loaded against. Silent that week. Rumbling three months later, by which time nobody connects it to the pothole.
- The steering geometry. Camber and toe move when a control arm or a strut takes a hit. The symptom is a pull, a wheel that tramlines, or a tyre wearing one shoulder.
- Control arm bushings. Rubber tears under shock loading rather than wearing out. Clunking over expansion joints and vague steering either side of centre.
- The strut itself. A bent rod binds. A knock on rebound and a car that never quite settles after a crest.
- The tyre's internal structure. A sidewall bulge is a broken cord and it is not repairable.
An alignment after any significant impact is part of the repair rather than an upsell. The geometry moved when the component did, and driving on it destroys a set of tyres.
Concrete slab, and the service drives
Much of the freeway network here is concrete slab with expansion joints, so a car at speed crosses one every few metres — a constant-frequency input for the length of a commute.
That does not damage anything the way a hole does; it fades dampers, because a damper turns movement into heat and this is movement without pause.
The service drives that run alongside the freeways are their own environment: heavily used, patched rather than resurfaced, with frequent entrances and kerbs. They concentrate exactly the kind of repeated small impacts that tear bushings.
Brine and freeze-thaw together
Detroit gets heavy winter treatment and a severe freeze-thaw cycle, and the two compound. The freeze-thaw breaks the surface apart; the brine gets into every cavity of the car that then drives over it.
So the salt-belt failures apply in full — corroded brake lines, seized caliper slides, wheel speed sensors bonded into knuckles — on a car whose suspension is simultaneously being beaten up.
That combination is why the buying rule matters more here than almost anywhere: the removal is the expensive half of every job, so the complete assembly beats the component nearly every time.
Nothing inspects it
Michigan has no periodic safety inspection. A car here can accumulate years of impact damage and corrosion with nothing flagging any of it.
For a used vehicle that is the first thing to know. Underbody condition, brake line condition, suspension play and wheel runout come before mileage and before service history — and none of them will have been checked by anybody.
Checked