The last two items on my list—clutch hydraulics and ball joints—aren’t as universal. Clutch hydraulic failure is usually age-related, and thus you don’t see it often on modern cars. And I include ball joints on the list mostly because if they fail, you lose control of the car, and thus you can’t afford to be wrong about it. They’re actually remarkably stout items on my 1970s BMWs, but if you google “ball joint failure,” you see photos of a variety of relatively late-model vehicles with a front wheel rotated 90 degrees and jammed up under the wheel well.

Another item that’s not on my “Big Seven” list is wheel bearings. They do eventually wear, and are certainly an item to replace when systematically sorting out a car that’s sat for decades, but their failure mode is so soft that it’s practically a pillow with a Cashmere cover. Wear is usually caused by a combination of high mileage and loss of lubrication. Play will eventually develop between the bearings and the race they run in. This will allow motion along the axis perpendicular to rotation, which in turn will increase the wear.

I’m not sure where you live, but many states don’t allow snow tires with studs, because of the damage to the roads. But on the subject of 2 vs 4 snow tires, when my wife got her first Prius, many years ago, the all season tires it had were absolutely useless in snow. So I ordered up a pair of dedicated snow tires from an online vendor. They CALLED me, saying they wouldn’t sell me just two tires, they needed to be on all 4 wheels, the traction differential was that great. I’ve never been without dedicated snow tires since then, the car will go just about anywhere in snow – and it is just front wheel drive.

Freewheel bearing check

I snugged them down, grabbed the wheel at 6 and 12 and verified that the play was gone, spun it and verified that the noise was gone, let the car down off the jack, and tightened them up with a torque wrench.

I was driving my 2003 E39 530i up to do some recording in Chelmsford, about 30 miles north of me, when I began to hear and feel a rumbling coming from the left front of the car. It ramped up over several minutes, but then plateaued. If it instead had gotten VERY loud VERY quickly, with obvious metal-smacking-against-metal instead of the more gentle rumble of a worn bearing, that would be the hallmark of loose lug nuts, something you need to pay attention to IMMEDIATELY because you may have only five or ten seconds before the wheel falls off.

I can only speculate what happened. Due to the space constraints in my garage, when I swap winter/summer wheels, I’ll usually pull one end of the car in, jack it up, swap both wheels, snug the lug nuts with a ratchet, let the car down, torque the nuts, air the tires, then pull the car out, flip it around, and do the other side. I must’ve gotten interrupted. Maybe I received a text I felt that I needed to respond to. Maybe my wife was leaving and I walked outside to kiss her goodbye. Maybe I had back pain and took a break. I don’t know.

Rob Siegel has been writing the column The Hack Mechanic for Roundel Magazine for 35 years, and is the author of eight books available on Amazon. He currently owns thirteen cars. Yes, his wife knows about all of them.

In contrast, rear wheel bearings in my vintage BMWs are so long-lived that, after owning upward of 70 cars, I’ve never replaced one. There’s a little journalistic sleight of hand in that statement, though. Thirty-five years ago, my wife and I were vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard in a high-mileage 1973 BMW Bavaria. We were coming home from dinner when a storm and tidal surge moved in, and while driving along the low, exposed road that runs along the barrier beach between Edgartown and Oak Bluffs on the eastern side of the island, crossed through a low-lying flooded section where seawater was unexpectedly deep. After that, the right rear wheel bearing began emitting an ever-increasing rumble. I limped the car home and looked at it, but didn’t own the bearing pullers I own now, and I paid a shop to replace it. So I didn’t replace it, but someone else did.

How to tell whichwheel bearingis bad in the front

About 10 years ago, I replaced the front wheel bearings in a 1999 BMW E39 528i wagon I owned. They weren’t rumbling, but I was doing a front-end refresh including struts and control arms. I learned that the front wheel bearings on this car are a completely different design than on the older BMWs I’d had—they’re part of an assembly that bolts directly to the steering knuckle and has the hub directly integrated with it. That is, there’s no banging out or pressing in of bearings. The whole thing bolts on, and the wheel bolts directly to it. I also learned that access to the upper bolts is impinged on by the bottom of the strut assembly, so if you’re replacing the struts, it’s a good time to refresh the bearings. So I did.

But then I had a thought—it was possible, though incredibly unlikely, that the problem could be loose lug nuts. After all, it was only a few weeks before that I’d swapped the car’s winter wheels for the summer ones. But, as I described in the wheel-fell-off article, for years I’ve been absolutely religious in my use of a torque wrench every single time a wheel is installed. I grabbed a half-inch ratchet handle and a 17mm socket and quickly checked the left front wheel’s lug nuts.

Fortunately, wheel bearing failure is almost always announced by a ballsy-sounding rumble that’s pretty hard to miss. If the bearing is bereft of lubrication, it may also squeak or squeal. The pitch and severity of the sound should vary directly with vehicle speed but not engine rpm. The sound may change when the brakes are applied.

After the recording session ended, I began driving back toward the highway. As I approached a small service station, I debated stopping to have them throw the car up on the lift and check it, but again, since the rumble remained low and constant, I headed home. Still, to err on the literal side of safety, I stayed in the right lane, turned the flashers on, and drove at 50 mph.

On 1970s-era BMWs, there are inner and outer front wheel bearings with each sitting in its own race that’s pressed into the hub. Since the front discs on these cars sit on the inside surface of the hub, and since the bearings lift out of their races and present their greasy private parts to you when you pull the hub off the spindle, the advice is that, if there’s no documentation on how old the bearings are, to replace both sets of bearings on both sides when the front discs are replaced.

Also I have forgotten to tighten lug nuts at least once in my driving career and that wheel will make one helluva racket and vibration before anything bad happens – although I still recommend double-checking the tightness

News you can use. Good article, Rob, and thou art no “hack” mechanic. This is the sort of thing we’d like to see more of in Hagerty, fewer here’s what your MustangCamaroFerrari’s worth. Thank you, sir.

Believing the rumble was coming from the left front bearing, I intentionally began with the right one to get a baseline. I jacked up that corner, spun the wheel, verified that the bearing was quiet, grabbed it at 6 and 12, and verified that it was play-free.

I was driving my 2003 E39 530i—the car I routinely describe as the best daily-driver BMW I’ve ever owned—up to a recording session about 30 miles from my house when I began to hear and feel a bit of a rumble in the front of the car. It appeared to be coming from the left front wheel. I was surprised at how quickly the rumble came on, but it stabilized at a fairly low level. That is, the symptom wasn’t like loose lug nuts, which, as I described in this Hagerty piece about losing a wheel, can announce itself with a rumble that gets so loud and progresses so quickly that you have only five or 10 seconds before the wheel falls off. Even so, to be safe, I slowed down and pulled into the right lane and paid very close attention. The sound varied directly with speed and changed when I tapped the brakes, so even though the symptom wasn’t exactly that of a bad wheel bearing, it was close enough that I allowed those “soft failure” diagnostic neurons to fire and continued on to my recording studio appointment.

I’m not sure about the wheel bearings giving you a warning. Years ago I was driving to college on the highway at ~65 MPH in my 84 Audi Coupe GT and it felt a little vague. I moved the wheel back and forth a little to see if it was just in my mind and the back right dropped, my brakes were hitting the ground. The back wheel had fallen off due to a bad bearing. Never made any noise or vibration. The weight was so far forward on that car that it went for a while without the back ever dropping with no tire. I never did find the wheel or tire, could have been gone for miles.

The other thing to check for is bearing play. The time-honored method is to jack up the car, set it on stands, grab the wheel at 6 o’clock and 12 o’clock, and push-pull-rock it back and forth. If you grab it at 3 o’clock and 9 o’clock, play can be due to a loose wheel bearing, but on a front wheel, it can also be due to anything in the steering chain. Play at 6 and 12 can generally only come from a wheel bearing.

My lug-nut vigilance has now officially increased to hyper-paranoid. I went out and double-checked the lug nuts on my wife’s car (they were fine).

It’s not the acceleration traction that becomes an issue with only 2 snow tires on the ground. It’s the DE-celeration. If braking hard ( like in, fer’ instance, trying to save yourself from sudden death in a panic stop) the two snow tires have appropriate grip, the all season ones don’t and will continue to slide their merry way into oversteer or understeer depending on your car (and situation). It is thus EXTREMELY dangerous to only mount two snow tires. It’s what us in the Rocky Mountains call a “Very Bad Idea”

Perhaps the down comforter of soft failures is a bad wheel bearing. Loss of lubrication will cause them to wear, resulting in a rumble that sometimes can be more felt than heard (they may also squeak or squeal), but the failure process is gradual. They’ll get louder as wear and play embrace each other in an ever-widening downward spiral, but you’d have to be an idiot not to hear it and address it, making outright failure rare. Wheel bearings are pretty robust in BMWs. After owning over 70 cars, I’ve only ever seen one wheel bearing that completely self-destructed—a ’67 2000CS I bought came with one that had destroyed the stub axle. I had to replace the entire front strut assembly.

How tocheck wheel bearingon AWD

Rear wheel bearings on old BMWs are incredibly robust. I’ve only ever had one go bad. It was on a Bavaria that my wife and I took on vacation to Martha’s Vineyard in 1986. We were foolishly driving in near-hurricane conditions and got caught in a tidal surge on the road that runs on the barrier beach between Edgartown and Oak Bluffs and drove through water that was deeper than we expected (as I said, foolish). On the drive home, the right rear wheel bearing began rumbling ominously. At the time, I didn’t own the necessary bearing puller, and had to take the car into the late great Beaconwood Motors who had the back page ad of Roundel for a generation. It was one of a handful of repairs the past 40 years I’ve paid someone else to do.

wheelbearing坏了

And obviously, there are common failures that are specific to vehicle make and/or model. I don’t road trip my vintage BMWs without checking the giubo—the rubber flex disc between the transmission and driveshaft—as well as carry a spare, as with age, they eventually crack. You can drive quite a way as they thump and smack the inside of the transmission tunnel on acceleration, but if they fail completely, the loose bolts can tear into the cover of the back of the transmission or break the ears on the transmission or driveshaft flanges.

And I’m going to have some sort of voodoo ceremony with that bag of Locktite-coated wheel bearing bolts. I can’t tell whether they were bad juju that triggered the problem or a talisman that warded off disaster, but clearly they played some role outside the normal Western vectors of Newtonian mechanics and Cartesian cause and effect. They deserve reverence.

When I arrived home, I pulled the nose of the car right into the garage, then hopped on the laptop to get a set of front wheel bearing on order. I looked on FCP Euro, and was more than a little surprised to find that a front wheel bearing kit with German FAG wheel bearing assemblies now cost $312. Of course, I still had that set of bolts, so I could save myself the $4.29 per bolt right there. I mean thirty-four bucks is thirty-four bucks, right? One FAG bearing was $139. I began entertaining replacing just the left bearing, then price-shopping other manufacturers, when I decided that I should be certain that the wheel bearing was really the problem.

I then moved to the suspected left front corner, jacked it up, and spun the wheel. It was noisy, though the noise was a little more clunky than rumbly. I grabbed the wheel at 6 and 12. Yup, play. Gotcha. Bad wheel bearing. I let the car down and began to walk back into the house to order the parts.

In the repair world, there are “hard failures” and “soft failures.” Hard failures are things that instantly drag a car to a stop when they break. Broken ball joint? The worst type of hard failure—the front wheel folds under the fender like a broken ankle and you lose control of the car. Bad fuel pump? Usually a hard failure—it either pumps or it doesn’t. (Okay, there are some exceptions. The one my E39 wigged out on a low tank in hot weather, then recovered. I replaced it anyway.)

I then jacked up the left front wheel and rocked it at 6 and 12. Yup, play. Then I spun it. Yup, rumbly. No doubt—a bad left wheel bearing. I set the car back down and began to walk back to the computer to order the bearings, vividly recalling how much of a pain in the butt they were to replace in the 528iT wagon ten years ago. I wondered if maybe still having those eight spare bearing bolts had made the whole thing a matter of fate.

How tocheck wheelhubbearing

Then I checked the lug nuts on the right front wheel. While none were loose to the point of being free-spinning, all were substantially below the 88 foot-pound torque spec. The rears were fine.

Why do I have these and why can I lay my hands on them instantly? As Joseph Fiennes said in Shakespeare in Love, “It’s a mystery.”

Rob’s latest book, The Best of the Hack Mechanic™: 35 years of Hacks, Kluges, and Assorted Automotive Mayhem is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.

Good story. One thing to remember is that whenever you install alloy wheels, and particularly those that don’t have conical lug nut seating surfaces, you should recheck the lug torques after 50 miles of driving. Almost no one ever does it, but lug nuts can and do occasionally loosen, and us humans make mistakes. This simple check can prevent a problem like the one you experienced.

How to tell whichwheel bearingis bad front or back

Still, it seems that I need to be reminded of that one just about every time I lift a wrench, so I’m certainly not casting a stone.

A few years back, I wrote a piece about front wheel bearing replacement on one of my 1970s BMWs. Like many other vintage cars, these have a hub with inner and outer bearings, both of which have races that are press-fit into the hub and bearing adjustment that’s achieved by tightening a castellated nut just the right amount, then putting a cotter pin through the castles and a hole in the end of the stub axle. Replacement of these bearings is messy, but at least it can be accomplished without any special bearing pullers, as the old race can be banged out with a hammer and a punch and the new one pushed in with a hammer and a right-sized socket. On these cars, the front discs are attached to the insides of the front hubs, so replacing the discs exposes the bearings. Thus, if the bearings’ ages are unknown or if they show any or make any noise, it’s prudent to replace them when changing discs. I’ve thus replaced dozens of them.

But there’s another lesson to be learned here as well: “Look for the easiest and cheapest fixes first (even if it can’t POSSIBLY be that)!”

Rob. Question, why were you putting snow tyres on and pulling them off of off all four wheels. Don’t the snow tyres only go on the driving wheels? Now I have see a few examples of some people from up north put them on the front wheels of rear wheel drive cars but I figured they were just not to bright Yankees.

In contrast, soft failures are things that either give you ample warning before they fail completely, or their failure doesn’t immediately drag the car into the breakdown lane. A textbook soft failure is when the alternator or voltage regulator dies. Even though the battery is no longer being charged, the car can continue to run for some amount of time off the battery alone. On a vintage car like a 2002, you can likely drive for hours during daylight before the battery no longer has enough juice to light the spark plugs. On a late-model car loaded with electric motors and control modules, you might have more like fifteen minutes to an hour—enough to get to a rest area, possibly even a repair shop.

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I think maybe you haven’t driven on modern snow tires, studded or studless. There’s never any vibration from modern snow tires, as long as they’re balanced properly, just like any other modern tire. Snow tires are made for stopping, turning, and going. If you only put them on your rear wheels they aren’t going to help you stop nor turn nearly as well as if you put them on all 4.

The real story starts about halfway through this piece. But if you’re a regular reader, you know that my stories are nothing without the proper context.

Considering 70% of your braking is done with the front wheels, along with 100% of your steering, I’d consider 4-corner winters “vital” equipment.

Next, I checked the right front wheel. I was horrified to find that its lug nuts, while not loose, hadn’t been torqued down.

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On newer BMWs, the front wheel bearings are very different than on the 1970s-era cars. About ten years ago, I owned a ’99 E39 528iT wagon that needed struts, control arms, and other front-end work. The E39’s wheel bearings are part of an assembly that includes the front hub—the wheel bearing assembly bolts to the steering knuckle, and the wheel bolts directly to the bearing assembly.

To make sure this doesn’t happen again, I’m instituting a new system of checking the lug nuts on all four wheels after I’ve done any work where a car is jacked up for any reason.

The first four items are fairly universal across makes and models, as well as on newer versus vintage cars. A dead fuel pump or alternator is about as likely to strand you on a 10-year-old car as on one built with Lyndon Johnson was in office. Ignition systems became enormously more reliable once points went away, but the crankshaft position sensors on which modern ignition systems rely on can fail. Cooling systems on newer cars are generally much better designed for real-world heat extremes than those on old cars, but modern plastic cooling system components have a far shorter lifetime than their old metal counterparts. Modern serpentine belts automatically stay tight, but when the belt tensioners fail, everything comes to a screeching smoking rubbery halt.

Although bearing rumble is usually quite clear, part of testing for a bad wheel bearing is to jack the car up, set it on stands, grab the wheel at the 6:00 and 12:00 positions, and push-pull it. If you’re hands are at 3:00 and 9:00 instead, play in a front wheel can come from anything in the steering mechanism, but 6-and-12 play pretty much has to be coming from the wheel bearing. In an old-school car with adjustable wheel bearings, if there’s no rumble, you can try adjusting the bearing by pulling the cotter pin and moving the castellated nut by one notch, but play plus rumble equals bad.

A veteran mechanic explained that to me while I was in the middle of tearing apart a dashboard for something that turned out to be a cheaper, easier, right-there-under-the-hood fix.

Still, to be careful, I pulled into the right lane, slowed down, and listened. The somewhat rapid onset was uncharacteristic of a wheel bearing, but the other symptoms fit. Since I had a recording appointment with a fiddle player, I preferred to keep going, unless of course I couldn’t for safety reasons. The rumbling remained at a constant low level, so I assumed it was a wheel bearing doing the soft failure thing, and continued on.

So, yeah, the symptoms of a bad wheel bearing are still a rumble that varies with speed, and wheel bearing play is still discernible by doing the 6-and-12 push-pull-rock thing. But when a rumble first appears, stop and check your lug nuts. If you don’t, a wheel bearing’s “soft failure” can turn hard in the quickest and most dangerous way imaginable.

I took the torque wrench and snugged down the nuts to the required 88 ft-lbs. Then, to quickly be certain this was the only problem, I jacked up the wheel again, spun it, and did the 6-and-12 push-pull. Noise and play gone.

And so, just to be certain, to placate my left brain and make sure I didn’t go to all that work unless it was absolutely necessary, I took a 1/2-inch ratchet and a 17mm socket and checked the wheel’s lug nuts.

Whew, crisis averted indeed! Here’s my process: when I remove a wheel, in addition to the star wrench or impact gun, I place six things on the floor of the garage – five lug nuts and a torque wrench (with the appropriate socket). I do not walk away from the reinstalled wheel until I’ve used that torque wrench to ensure the lugs are cinched down to spec. I do not put the torque wrench away until I’m positive that all wheels that’ve been removed have been sufficiently tightened. Since I started this tactic 50 years or so ago, I’ve never lost so much as a lug nut (and I see them often alongside the road – especially fancy chrome ones from expensive wheels).

The biggest determining factor in the usage of snow tire is consistent low temperatures. The compounds are different and snow tires have more traction on dry surfaces once the temperature gets within swinging distance of freezing. Studs are illegal in many places and aren’t required to have effective winter tires (they help ice, but that’s where their advantages end).

When I was done a few hours later, I wondered if I should play it safe and head to the nearest service station and ask them to throw the car up on the lift and check it out. The rumble, however, was still at a fairly low and constant level, so I continued onto the highway. I turned on my flashers, set my cruise control for 50 mph, and hugged the right lane. It got no worse on the drive home. I arrived at my house without incident, and pulled the nose of the car directly into the garage.

Rob’s newest book, The Best of The Hack Mechanic, is available here on Amazon, as are his seven other books. Signed copies can be ordered directly from Rob here.

Glad to read that the last lug nut didn’t come loose. I swap studded snow tires on and off each year on three cars; two of mine and my sister’s car. Having lug nuts come loose is something that gives me concern each year, but god forbid that it happen to my sister. So I usually go around each car TWICE with the torque wrench to make sure I haven’t overlooked one wheel. The lug nut torque spec on my sister’s car is 115 ft-lbs (’20 Grand Cherokee), so I hope she never has to change a flat tire – she lives two hours away.

I intentionally jacked up the car at the right front wheel—the one I didn’t think was making the noise—to get a baseline. I grabbed it at 6 and 12, rocked it, verified it was tight, and spun it. As expected, it was quiet.

Optimus, you would not want snow tyres on the front of a rear wheel drive car because the studs would cause you to loose traction on dry pavement. Second snow tyres with their aggressive tread would cause a vibration in the steering of the car, similar to the mudder tyres on off-road vehicles. So no on a two wheel drive rear wheel drive car you do not want snow tyres on the front unless you live in an are where the snow stays on the roads from late fall to late spring.

Since the problem was clearly a bad wheel bearing, I immediately went inside and jumped on my computer to get the part on order ASAP. I found that FCP Euro’s price on a front wheel bearing kit with a pair of German FAG bearing assemblies and the eight Loctite-coated bolts was over $300. Gulp! I began thinking about replacing only the bad bearing, and looking at prices and reviews of other less expensive aftermarket bearings, when I remembered the whole episode 10 years ago with replacing the wheel bearings in the wagon and how difficult those factory-Loctited bolts were to remove. A back injury I sustained last summer still has me hobbling around, and that kind of upper body twisting is a sure-fire recipe for relapse. Plus, there was the issue of the bottoms of the front struts being in the way of the bearing bolts. I realized that what I really needed to do was go out to the garage and verify beyond a shadow of a doubt that the bearing was actually the problem.

When I removed the E39 wagon’s old bearings, I was very surprised at the degree to which the Loctite on the old bolts sneered at my impact wrench and fought me every thread of the way. I needed to use a four-foot pipe on the end of a 3/4-inch breaker bar and grinch it off a sixth of a turn at a time, repeating this for each of the four bolts on both sides. I was exhausted by the time I was done. I made a mental note that this was a part I was unlikely to replace again if it wasn’t obviously bad.

For a decade, I’ve written about “The Big Seven” things that are most likely to strand you on a road trip—fuel delivery issues, ignition issues, cooling system issues, charging system issues, belts, clutch hydraulics, and ball joints.

wheelbearing中文

I had a 99 Buick with cartridge style bearing and hub where the bearings developed play (noticeable in the handling) before ever exhibiting noise

This gets into the issue of “hard” versus “soft” failures. In a piece a while back, I made the distinction between “hard failures”—things like fuel pumps that pretty much either work or they don’t and instantly drag the car to the breakdown lane when it’s the latter—and “soft failures”—things that give you a lot of warning before they disable the car. The “soft failure” example I gave was the charging system. If the alternator or regulator goes bad and triggers the battery light, you can get many miles down the road—certainly off the highway, maybe even to a repair shop—before there’s not enough juice to fire the spark plugs.

When you replace these wheel bearing assemblies, you’re advised to also replace the bolts holding them in. The replacement bolts come pre-treated with a Loctite-like coating.

How tocheck wheelbearings on a trailer

I’m convinced it was that one snug nut that saved me. Had that one loosened up, I would have had only a brief window before all hell broke loose like I’d experienced before.

Not snow tires, winter tires. And yes, I put 4 of them on my Boxster each November and pull them off in March or April. Not much point in being able to go if you can’t turn or stop.

Good advice. I am friends with a guy who owned a tire store (since retired), and he hammered that into me for years. It’s now kind of second nature to me to re-torque after 30 and then 50 miles. Some people might think I’m a little bit anal about torquing lugs, but I’ve never “thrown a shoe” since beginning driving in the late ’50s!

However, I recently replaced the rear wheel bearings (one was rumbling) in my Winnebago Rialta (a VW Eurovan with a Winnebago camper body on it). This is a fairly common configuration where a rear hub and stub axle are pressed into the center section of a bearing, which in turn is pressed into a fixed housing. Thus, in two separate steps, the hub has to be pulled from the bearing, then the bearing pulled from the housing. I felt like I’d paid my debt to The Automotive Powers That Be, incurred from when I passed on doing the rear bearing on the Bavaria all those years ago.

It’s usually easy to confirm a bad wheel bearing. Jack up the wheel, support that corner of the car with a jackstand, and spin the wheel. If the wheel is not a drive wheel—that is, if it’s a rear-wheel drive car and you’re checking a front wheel, or vice versa—the wheel should be easy to spin, and a rumble, if it exists, should be plainly audible. If it’s a drive wheel, though, this is more difficult, as the CV joints and the differential or transaxle are also turning, which makes it harder to spin the wheel fast as well as creates other possible sources for the rumble.

I have no idea how this happened. Due to the odd configuration of my garage, when I swap wheels, I’ll usually pull one end of the car in the garage at a time, jack it up, swap both wheels, let it down, torque down the nuts on both wheels and inflate both tires to the correct pressure, pull the car out, spin it around, and do the other end. I don’t know if, between doing the back and the front, I got interrupted by a phone call, or if this was some artifact of the fact that I make accommodations for working with a back injury in many ways, which may include stopping when I feel sore.

My ever-rational left-brain shot back indignantly. “You can’t be serious,” it sneered. “You actually had a wheel fall off that 1600 back in 1984. And you’ve had two close calls, both more recently than you’d like to admit. You know what loose lug nuts sound like, and this wasn’t it. And you learned your lesson. You conditioned yourself to always tighten lug nuts with a torque wrench. It’s not loose lug nuts. Really. It’s not. It can’t be. You are not that careless.”