I recently had all brake pads and rotors replaced. When the mechanic took it for a test drive, he said it sounded like the bearings in both rear wheels were bad.
I had my wife drive around while I sat in the back seat. There is indeed a rhythmic noise coming from each wheel when it gets above 35 mph, and it gets faster along with the speed of the car. It’s not a growl but it’s definitely noticeable. From the front seats you don’t hear any noise from the front wheels, only the back wheel noises.
I jacked up the car a few inches with the car off and in park and on each rear tire there was no play when I tried to tug on the wheel, in neither the 3-9 or 6-12 positions. I also spun the wheels around and heard a slight scraping noise, as well as a little rattling in the passenger side wheel.
Sounds like the mechanic is right, but before I take it in for an $800 job, could it be anything else? Could the new brakes be causing any of these noises? The brakes seem to work fine. The car has 75,000 mi. on it.
I recorded all the noises but as a new user i can’t upload them…
I just had the wheels rotated when the brakes were done and they were rotated regularly before that.
Here are the youtube links for the videos of me spinning the wheels. The recordings of the wheel noises while driving are audio files and I can’t upload them to Youtube at the moment.
@cdaquila can you remove the flags? I’m assuming @itrontz getting flagged for putting links in because he’s a new user (maybe lift the upload restrictions for him too so he can get the audio files uploaded?)
The symptoms indeed are consistent w/wheel bearing problems. There’s often no play felt, even though the bearing is bad. The other common cause for these symptoms are tire problems, as noted above. OP might want to disprove the tires as the cause first. As long as there’s nothing visibly wrong with the tires/treads, I expect replacing the wheel bearings will do the trick.
