Just wondering if anyone has ever experienced this before. 2009 JCW, 22,600 miles. Just replaced the run flats yesterday with some Continental ExtremeContact DWS tires in 215/45 17. Installer is top notch and tires were mounted, balanced perfectly. On the way home today, I noticed a very subtle, but noticeable vibration/noise coming from the floor pan. It is very rhythmic, almost as if it was the ruts in the road but it is not. It becomes more constant during high speed right turns and less evident during left ones...+65mph.
It has been suggested that it might be a wheel bearing that just coincidentally started making noise when the tires were swapped. I will rotate them tomorrow just to make sure, but wanted to throw it out there if someone has experienced something similar. Only other thing done differently is I let the girlfriend drive the car home (with me in it) and she is new to standard transmissions and struggled somewhat trying to start off smoothly. She stalled the car twice and chirped a tire but nothing drastic. She is kinda bummed thinking this is her fault, but I am pretty sure it is not.

Thoughts?

 

I'm betting that it's just the new tires. My winter tires (blizzaks) are pretty loud and all winter I was thinking that I needed new bearings soon too. However, I just went back to my summers and the noise is completely gone. On my parents Volve s40 there was a lot of road noise as well until we replaced the tires. Perhaps you got a bad tire?? That does happen sometimes...though rare.

Since you just noticed it directly after changing tires I would be pretty confident it's something to do with them. Good luck whatever you find!

 

For the record, there was no noise yesterday on the 60 mile trip home from the tire shop and none this morning driving 25 miles down. Only on the way home, about 10 miles into the trip and currently.

 

Could be possible you lost a tire weight and even if it was balanced to start out it is not balanced now..

 

First thing I checked. Not only are all weights present and accounted for, they didn't move either.

 

Might want until those new tires are worn in a bit more before worrying too much.

 

I think you are right.

 

Noticed the same thing with my blizzak runflats as well. I've never used winter tires before, and realized that with the grooved tire tread there probably would be a lot more noise.

 

Certain road surfaces will cause tire noise too. There is a mile long section of hiway here in town that every time I drive on it I think I have a flat tire, the car gets squirelly and makes all sorts of weird vibrations, a mile later it's all gone.

 

In case anyone was interested, the noise turned out to be a bad LF wheel bearing. Go figure.