At about 15k miles a noisy left wheel bearing was replaced under warranty; now, at 64k miles, the right bearing needs to be replaced due to noise.

Are Subaru wheel bearings so unreliable that they don't last very long?

Also, both left and right steering rack boots are tearing. How long do the boots generally last. One garage told me that they have about a 30k mile life so that relatively frequent boot replacements are not uncommon.

Depends on the type of driving you do. Wheel bearings on Subaru's (with the exception of some specific models that have had problems - SVX, early Forester/Impreza, etc) tend to last a long time. 200k is not at all uncommon. Spirited driving and lots of hard cornering can take it's toll and end their life early - also it could be that a number of bearings in the shipment used for the knuckles on your car was dropped and thus shortened their life..... bearings are very sensitive to handling and thus it's not uncommon to see a car that has a premature bearing failure subsequently have more of the same bearings fail - they probably were from the same shipment to the manufacturer and some shipping monkey dropped a whole box of them. That is supposed to invalidate their use but often "mistakes" like that will go unreported for fear of job loss, punishment, etc.

 

GD

Well, I'm a reasonably sedate driver; I rarely, if ever, push my Sube hard.

The garage that just replaced the bad bearing (for about $400) said that in their experience some Subaru wheel bearings do go bad early on and some last 200k miles.

So either some knuckle-dragging neanderthals drop them or there are quality control issues during manufacturing.

Edited May 25, 201114 yr by ergo

If you are like me and bomb 4 interstate on-off ramps a day, the left ones don't last as long as the right-hand ones!

 

Dave