My car has had a rhythmic wobble sound that changes with speed, that I thought might be a wheel bearing. Took it to the mechanic to check it out and I got to watch all 4 wheels spin in the air with the car on the lift. It is, in fact, AWD.
Also, as far as they can tell, the source of the noise is my front passenger wheel is out of round. They swapped it over to the driver side and I’m going to see if the noise seems to have followed it.
The noise was also coming from the same corner when I had my summer wheels and tires on, which is why I thought it didn’t have to do with wheels. But my mechanic suggested that maybe that corner’s wheel was also bent on my summer wheels, which isn’t as crazy as it sounds, because that corner takes a beating. We don’t have a ton of potholes here in Madison, but there are a lot of manhole covers that are sunk too far down into the road surface. There were two near me. One was fixed a few months ago, and another is still there. I just hit the damn thing again this past weekend. I need to stay out of the right lane on that road.
The front passenger wheel on my summer tires has a little bend in the lip so it’s possible it’s also bent. Go figure. There’s a mobile wheel repair company that my mechanic recommended, so if the noise now seems like it’s on the driver’s side, I’ll have them come out and fix up both bent wheels.