A couple of possibilities come to mind. One is a possible missing or damaged seal on the inside of the knuckle. This would allow water intrusion and early failure. I don’t know if this applies to this car, but I have seen it on some GMs. Another possibility is just plain old cheap parts. I have had bad luck with cheap wheel bearings from big box stores like Advance or AutoZone, so if your shop has been getting the parts there, have them try a different supplier, even if you have to pay extra for it. I have had particularly good luck with CarQuest bearings and hubs. They cost more, but it’s worth it for their longevity.

After I drilled out the defective sensor , I took a reamer to the hole. The shop that removed the other sensor (left front) was nice enough to let me go home without a sensor (I got one from an online Toyota dealer at a big discount). And my labor is free.

you can get the whole hub and bearing for like $150 , so your mechanic is telling you it is going to take him 5 hours to do the job on a bearing ?? I doubt it , i would run from that guy .

I took my knuckle to a shop and they pressed out my bearing and he said hub was scored but he had 1 used. For $20. I tried to pay with my card and tech said hub was his and cash only. Had to run to atm for $20 cash. Bet tech had a few hubs in his toolbox. From other jobs?

Bearingfailure symptoms

With a total of nine bearing replacements, you’d think someone would have accidentally installed it close enough to correctly that it would last. I don’t think I’d have much luck telling a mechanic how to do their job, so I’ll try to find a shop that specializes in Toyotas (maybe even the dealer$hip) and hope they know what they’re doing.

My stepdaughter drives a 2001 Toyota Corolla with 130,000 miles on it. A couple years ago the right front wheel bearing failed. The loud music she plays in the car covered up the noise, so she drove on the bad bearing for a while and it got chewed up pretty badly. A local shop replaced it, then she moved to another state and the bearing failed again and she took it to an auto repair chain. They replaced the bearing/hub assembly, but since then it has failed seven more times, with failure intervals of a few hundred to a few thousand miles. The shop has replaced the bearing under warranty, and they’ve also replaced the half shaft, CV, steering knuckle, and spindle, all at no cost due to the warranty on the bearing replacement. They have also aligned the front end. The last bearing replacement was a thousand miles ago, and it already sounds like it needs another one. What else could be causing the repeated failures?

My stepdaughter’s job is delivering Chinese food, so I’ll bet she’s hit a few curbs with the right front tire. I’ll definitely have the shop look at the control arm.

I think(?) on this model 2 bearings are used on each side. On a setup like this there is usually a spacer between the 2 bearings. If the spacer is omitted this means that when someone tightens the halfshaft nut on the axle both bearings will suffer excessive crush. When this happens the bearings will not last long.

Bearingfailure reasons

It still boils down to an installer problem more than likely. Is it known that once assembled the halfshaft and wheel assembly will rotate freely? It should. If it even feels snug there’s a bearing crush problem.

Bearingfailure effects

This doesn’t include the cost of replacing one perfectly good ABS sensor that had to be destroyed in the process. (tech told me that the sensor would be in the way of the press, and they couldn’t remove it without destroying it. ). I believed him, as I replaced the ABS sensor on the other side a year earlier. It was defective. I too had to destroy the old one to remove it, as Toyota machined the hole too small. Talk about a tight fit! There was TSB about this, I believe.

You Don’t know much about cars anyone can answer wherever old posts outthere, cuz thousand of car owners searching for answers for their car problems online everyday ,somebody might be having the same problem right now.

Elantra has same bearing setup as Honda’s. A shop can lowball the cost and then have to replace more parts or remove knuckle to press out bearing. The bearing is pressed into the hub. So, assume the hub will be damaged or scored.image600×600 22.3 KB

Types ofbearingfailures and their causes

As always when in doubt you get a second opinion . It could be that this shop does not have the right equipment for the job or there is a lot of labor involved .

Have you taken the car to an alignment shop to see if the alignment is in spec? They can usually tell if a suspension part is damaged when a normal shop can’t.

Man, they must really be bad. The CV halfshaft usually does a great job of isolating all but one axis of movement from the wheels to the engine/transaxle assembly. With two CV joints between the engine/transaxle assembly to the right front wheel, both can usually move around independently from each other pretty robustly without translating anything but rotational forces affecting either.

I paid $250 parts and labor for the front wheel bearing of my previous Toyota Corolla. It had to be pressed in also. They put in a Timken bearing and it didn’t take much time…around 45 minutes and I was out of there.Shop around because your estimate seems on the high side.

Bearing failedsymptoms

Not necessarily. I had this setup on my old Mazda Protege. You press the hub out of the bearing, and the inner race of the bearing is stuck in the hub. You then carefully score the outside of the inner race, and strike it once or twice with a chisel…the inner race splits in too, and you’re left with the hub, which you can press into the new bearing.

Dropped my car off at a mechanic to check into an issue I’ve been having (groaning in the front/left wheel). Turns out it is a wheel bearing that needs to be replaced and the mechanic quoted me $750 for the job, saying “the bearing needs to be pressed and it’s a fair amount of labor”.

You did the right thing by getting other quotes and as an aside, never give a lot of credence to online reviews. Some may be fake and in some cases people may have been robbed blind and simply do not realize it. Their car is fixed for double what anyone else charges so they’re happy with it all.

Cool. With that said, you really should consider getting the other one replaced at the same time…see if the shop will give you a break on the labor.

I was having exactly same problem, turn out it was frozen caliper( pin), frozen caliper(s) causing brakes works much harder and generate excessive heat that burn out the new bearings in no time.

I thought sometimes they just replace the whole hub part is a little more but less labor. That price sounds high you need to get a second quote.

Same with a guy I know in my area who passed away back in 2011. He BSed, cobbled together, hacked up, and in general screwed everyone over yet everyone within 25 miles of him praised his name to the mechanical heavens. Go figure…

I agree (though might not have added the part about him not knowing much about cars, since that’s not in evidence in this thread). You provided input that hadn’t been mentioned before and that might be of value to someone with this problem.

What is the most common cause ofbearingfailure

Wheelbearing failed

An update: the shop said the control arm is fine, but that the transmission mount and engine mount are shot and they think that’s what’s been causing the problem. Apparently when the engine and transmission can move around too much, they can put stress on the bearings. We’ll know in a few months whether this has fixed the problem for good.

They need to be tight due to the super tight tolerance on positioning for proper operation. I did some work recently and had to R&R an ABS sensor. Long story short, a thousandth made a huge difference in signal level. Too close and it rubs, too far and weak signal. Rust forming on the spacer was enough to cause weak signal…removing them required diligent care not to damage them…

You should also verify how many wheel bearings they’re replacing. If it were me, I would go ahead and replace the bearing on the other side of the vehicle as well…chances are, it’s not far behind in terms of failure.

I got tired of this and thus did my first set of wheel bearings. Apparently all it took was installing them properly. The shop was doing them by feel. The recommended procedure was much more precise involving a torque wrench (torque to X lb., back of X% of a turn or whatever). Anyway, long story short, I followed the procedure and had no more bearing problems. I’m not sure how one politely asks whether a shop had checked up on the manufacturer specific install guidelines but I’d be working on figuring that out.

My theory? Someone forgot the spacer during the first bearing replacement and during the subsequent multiple replacements they see no spacer so therefore it does not exist in their thinking. One would think that someone would have considered the possibility at some point during all of this. Hope that helps anyway.

Scope of work as per the first shop was to “replace the left/front wheel bearing and press the new one”, that’s all they mentioned.

In one of my many episodes that led me to just doing my own darned car work I kept having recurring problems with the rear wheel bearings in a '95 Caravan. I’d get them done, they’d get noisy before very long, I’d go back, something would be “adjusted” or the bearings would be replaced again only to get noisy again.

Yeah, tight but not pressed in I had to pry mine out a fraction at a time, going around to keep it from getting jammed. Both GM and an 03 Toyota Camry. The GM had a penta-socket head fastener on one side and a pressed in “rivet” on the other. Still struggling to understand/justify the need for such hardware…

It is also possible for other parts of the suspension to create a problem as Bladecutter noted so maybe a good alignment/suspension shop is in order.

Ask your daughter if she has nailed a curb with her car. Chances are the control arm is bent, and that’s causing stress on the wheel bearing.

I’m going to back up here a bit and admit I’m wrong. Being curious, I took a look at the parts layout of this and it shows only 1 bearing per side. This means no spacer in the middle. However, the layout was a bit murky on a few points.

Did you get an itemized estimate? If not, ask for one. Do that when you get a second opinion too. That way you can easily compare the two. Don’t tell the second shop what the other one estimated.

Types ofbearingfailures

Thanks all, appreciate the help. I did call a second and third shop and was quoted $350 by one and $380 from the other. Both shops gave me their estimate, and when they then asked what I was quoted when it was diagnosed they said the shop I went to was notorious for extremely high prices and that $750 was way too high… I’m surprised since the first shop had great reviews.

You didn’t mention the year of your Elantra, but when I plugged in a 2015 into repairpal.com for an estimate, my local zip code brought up an estimate for $173-266 to change a single wheel bearing…you definitely need to get a 2nd and 3rd quote

Well, one thing for sure is that the bearings are not defective from the start. This almost certainly has to be a mechanic error from the first replacement and the last box of bearings may have been damaged from an oversight.