Novel structures in vehicle control-by-wire chassis have re-emphasized the problem of wheel shimmy. Proper suppression of shimmy in the independent wheel subsystems would significantly improve the performance of the steer-by-wire control. In this paper, a wheel shimmy suppression method using a nonlinear energy sink is proposed. Compared with traditional methods of increasing steering damping, NES seldom interferes with the designed steering dynamics of the vehicle due to its particularly small mass and volume, thus reserving availability for in-service or after-designed vehicles. By installing NES in the wheel frame, a single towed wheel model with NES is constructed. Although NES has almost no effect on the linear stability characteristics, an excellent effect on suppressing vibration amplitudes is explored where over 90% oscillation amplitude of shimmy is mitigated by NES within a wide range of reasonable parameters. Global optimization for optimal NES set-up in unstable speed ranges is further proposed to handle the speed-dependent nature of shimmy, and the result highlights its effectiveness and parameter robustness. Integration of the single-wheel model into the full vehicle with independent steering structures summarizes that NES could be a favorable way to both suppress the existing shimmy phenomenon and control the coupled lateral oscillations of the vehicle body.