Good afternoon elekie&a/c doctor,

Thank you for your prompt reply and information. I can confirm that I will be having a full wheel alignment check carried out on all four wheels. I have been quoted £270.00 to carry out an ADAS recalibration following the wheel alignment.

I also posted this question on the technical forum at www.volkswagenforum.co.uk and an experienced staff member and administrator of the forum said that ADAS recalibration “Is recommended IF anything is done to the alignment”.

To some extent you've been misinformed. Generally speaking ADAS recal is only needed if the thrust angle is changed. The thrust angle is half the difference between the rear toe angles, it should be zero, or nearly zero. If the thrust angle is non-zero (usually because one or both rear toe angles are wrong) then the vehicle will tend to crab along the road. This upsets the path prediction algorithm in the ADAS software. So the thrust angle should be set zero and then an ADAS calibration performed. What this means in practise is that if you have an alignment done and no adjustment is made to rear toe angle (i.e. thrust angle is already zero, or close to zero) then no ADAS cal is required. Incidentally the whole ADAS recalibration is set up to be a money spinner for dealers. It would be relatively simple to include self-calibration within the ADAS software since all the required parameters can be computed as the vehicle is being driven.