Can misalignment cause cupping or will misalignment cause irregular wear only?
Answer Ben, It takes lots of experience to distinguish between “Cupping” and “Irregular Wear” in modern radial passenger car tires and, frankly, most normally experienced people do not have it. Irregular wear gets called cupping on a regular basis. Since radial tires are fairly insensitive to the wear caused by imbalance and bad shocks, but fairly sensitive to alignment induced wear, you’re probably safe assuming the alignment is the problem.
