I'm quite confident my '06 has never been crashed, and it's nice and tight. With one exception: the subtle but frequent creaking noise I started to notice at the base of the passenger's side windshield pillar.

As the weather has gotten warmer, this noise has gotten quieter, but it's still my frequent companion. It's not a rattle or a squeak, not your typical plastic-on-plastic noise. It's more a continuous series of little creaks and ticks whenever I go over any sort of bumps or washboard pavement.

I took it to the dealership for this and some other warranty service. Their comment was that they don't cover rattles and squeaks on a CPO once it's out of new-car warranty (it just crossed the 4-year mark). This peeved me a bit because I'd had it in just before warranty expiration for the same complaint, they knew it, and they'd failed to fix it. But in order to be "nice," they granted me one man-hour of free exploration.

The service writer's report (they wouldn't let me talk on the phone to the tech himself): The writer claimed this particular tech is very adept at hunting down noises. The guy stripped the trim to access the pillar, "crimped some metal," drove it again, and felt it was maybe better but not gone. (It's not gone, and it's not noticeably better.) He concluded that he couldn't get at it without removing the windshield and doing major dash-removal surgery to weld and/or "do more crimping." The service writer added that to avoid windshield sealing problems, they always farmed out windshield removal to a third-party service, which added hundreds to the bill. Some questioning coaxed out the conclusion that their idea of a full investigation and fix might run me about $1,000. Hmmm.

I have no intention of working with the dealership again on this problem. What I'll probably do is wait until next winter for the noise to be more easily identifiable, and then if I'm feeling flush, turn it over to my indie mechanic.

But does this expert audience have any guesses? I'm gathering from all this that the tech suspects a broken weld in the unibody somewhere near the end of the firewall. Yet a knowledgeable friend tells me that's virtually unheard of in a modern unibody that hasn't been crashed. Thoughts?

 

I have a creak that behaves exactly the opposite, temp wise. If car sits in sun, there is a creak somewhere on passenger side, but seems to be near the roof center console rather than pillar. As car cools down, the creak stops.

 

Mine was there for one summer/winter season and it went away to never return. I did not let anyone work on my car to cure any noises. I only had two, the other one a rattle in one of the A/C vents - they both vanished and now my car is rattle free. My experience tells me that you let the "techs" work on the interior trim of your car and they break more than they fix.