Uh, oh, here we go again...

 

It went away when they got rid of the crap rear trailing arm suspension (i believe porsche also used rear trailing arms)

 

Yup. And as posted, wears the hell out of tires. And can diminish traction during acceleration and braking.

Barry

 

Can someone post a picture of what exactly this thing looks like?

 

Here's a look at a 3 series with a slight negative camber in the rear wheels:


Here's a look at a car that not only illustrated a bit of negative camber but also shows the way the tires are stretched too much at the rim:


And, in case you still weren't sure what negative camber looks like, take a look at this...

 

Is having a slight negative camber really bad or what?

 

No, not really. BMW dials in a little negative camber to help with cornering, etc. but the trade off is that you may experience a little uneven tire wear...

 

No, having a bit of negative camber is really good. The more camber you have, the better grip you have (as long as you have properly designed performance tires), up to about 3.5 degrees or so.

However, having toe-out in the rear is really bad unless you're a drifter. Toe-out in the rear causes oversteer... massive oversteer. Most specs call for a bit of toe-in on the rear. In the front, you should have a little bit of toe-out to improve the initial turn-in response.

 

Thats not quite right mate, negative camber is used to offset the body roll of the car to keep the contact patch of the tyre flat on the surface of the road, the less roll you have in the chassis of a car the less camber you need generally speaking. Too much negative or positive camber can actually lose you grip, with some performance tyres and race tyres negative camber can also give you more grip because of something called Camber Thrust..........im sure this applies to all tyres but is exploited properly in the design of these example.

Your quite right in your generalisation about a bit of camber being good however

You can see in my pics here I don't have that much camber in the rear wheels on my E46, around -2.5 degrees in fact, this was caused by setting my KW variant 3 coil-overs very low ( the more the E46 rear suspension compresses the more negative camber is added to the geometry )

My rear tyres wore out in the inside edge in no time at all, less than 5000 miles in fact, was very good on the track however where it was very stable.

 

Ouch, thanks for calling me out on my lame attempt for humor.