Zero recourse.
Alignment is a wear/tear item. It may be covered if you brought it up when the vehicle is brand new and had a faulty alignment from the factory, but with 26k miles, it is not considered a manufacturer defect.
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I think he meant that his dealer missed that the alignment was off during service visits, so recourse against the dealer.
I wonder if the dealer can be held liable for a W&T item for not ‘identifying it’.
More than likely the Service advisor will be written up and that’s about it.
Maybe because it’s a FWD platform pushing the torque of a turbo engine thru the front tires?
Either way you have no recourse to say “someone should have noticed it.”
The first person who should have noticed it is you.
Next time pay attention to your tires more regularly.
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Do you have a staggered tire setup? If not, have you rotated your tires before? If you’ve rotated your tires before, the shop would/should have mentioned the uneven or higher wear rate.
Are your front tires worn evenly, or unevenly?
This. Plus, alignment can be affected by something as simple as hitting a pothole too hard. So there’s no easy way to prove it’s a ‘defect’. Also, letting it get to the point where the tires need to be replaced, that’s going to make it hard to argue you had no culpability here. How often did you rotate the tires?
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And
8 months is a long time, even if you didn’t drive for most of that, all it takes it one curb/pothole.
Does the Oct 2020 service mention the depth on all 4 tires?
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The tires should have been rotated multiple times so it should wear evenly give or take.
So it could be 1 if 2 things
1 Your service isn’t rotating your tires and therefore not looking at them for uneven wear, so then checking alignment wouldn’t even be a question.
Or 2 something happened since the last rotation that has caused them to become misaligned (hit a pothole or a curb etc) and it wore them down quickly.
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Agree. I always rotate my tires during service, even though Volvo does not require rotation.
If you do it yourself or it’s somehow free, sure. Otherwise you’re better off saving that money towards a new set of tires.
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For $60 a year? lol
I take that as “60 bucks a year isn’t going to save you a set of tires, so why bother unless it’s free.” To be fair, he’s not wrong, at least not in my situation. I could rotate them every 2k, and I’d still need a set of tires.
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Dealer would miss out on a service opportunity, but I don’t think you can hold a dealership liable to call out maintenance the customer should be aware of.
Take it as “why bother doing it yourself to save $60/year” 
There is also balancing there.
America’s Tire will rotate for free.
The point is doing it during scheduled service so not to spend extra time on it.
My Volvo dealer rotates my tires for $20 on annual service.
Why waste time booking another appointment when you can get everything done at once?
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Tire wear is measured in time? “LOL”
The average cost around here is $40 plus tax. 5 rotations in 25,000 miles will cost $200+… that’s almost the cost of two brand new front tires.
Even if you pay less, putting that money towards new tires makes sense… rather than eking out a few more miles thru rotation. Especially on a lease, instead of paying for new tires at the end (or prepaying at the beginning).
Why 5 rotations in 25K miles? I think recommended is every 6k miles. Not everyone can do it themselves and there is also balancing that goes with rotation. Do you do balancing yourself also? But I agree that, most likely, any set of tires will needs to be replaced after 25-30K miles.
I would still rotate on a FWD car. My front Conti Pros only lasted 20k because I did not rotate, while rears were still good.
I have almost this exact issue on my x3. ~25k miles in and front tires are badly worn on outsides only. Rear and inside tread are almost perfect. I noticed the issue during the first half of my cross country trip in may (~18k) and had them check it on the way home. I have a staggered setup and the bmw service tech blamed that instead of the alignment. Upon review it’s very clear that the alignment was the reason for the wear.
It’s quite an annoying issue on a lease, since I’ve only needed to service it every 10k miles (basically twice) and if they didn’t pick it up on the first service (they didn’t) then it’s just like hey man sorry you didn’t check out your tires. Like max said, At this point I’m saving the money for a new front front set, which I was basically guaranteed to pay for given the issue.