Follow-up:
We couldn't even get an appointment within 7 days anywhere within 2 hours of St. George/Vegas, etc., so we limped it on back to Colorado and the noise got steadily worse over time.
We took it to the dealer and they commenced a long set of repairs that took almost 2 weeks, all covered by warranty.
The worsening noise was due to a bearing failing and getting ground into metal bits inside the front differential. I suspect that this bearing was the original problem (or maybe it was the left front wheel bearing that got replaced). At the end of the day, they had to replace most of the guts of the front differential and both wheel bearings. This is occurring at ~35k miles. This is after the brake rotors were trash at less than 20k miles.
Did I get a lemon or what? On the one hand, it's a great vehicle -- tremendous power, comfortable ride, decent mpg, etc. On the other hand, I haven't had a vehicle this unreliable since the variety of $500 cars I drove in high school.
Is 2018 just a crummy year and I should swap for something else?
Are these things really not built for driving in the mountains of Colorado? We don't use it that much (2018 with 37k miles now), but a fair number of the miles are family of 5 and our gear driving to go ski or camp or towing a light trailer with a raft on it (total weight less than 500 lbs, with usually ~50 on the tongue). So it's common for us to have 1000-1500 lbs of total passengers/payload/trailer weight and then drive it over a series of high mountain passes. But shouldn't that be workable for a truck-based SUV with 385 hp? We aren't really offroading (only a little bit of mild stuff that you could do in a subaru no problem). We don't want a mall-crawler. We want a truck.
We couldn't even get an appointment within 7 days anywhere within 2 hours of St. George/Vegas, etc., so we limped it on back to Colorado and the noise got steadily worse over time.
We took it to the dealer and they commenced a long set of repairs that took almost 2 weeks, all covered by warranty.
The worsening noise was due to a bearing failing and getting ground into metal bits inside the front differential. I suspect that this bearing was the original problem (or maybe it was the left front wheel bearing that got replaced). At the end of the day, they had to replace most of the guts of the front differential and both wheel bearings. This is occurring at ~35k miles. This is after the brake rotors were trash at less than 20k miles.
Did I get a lemon or what? On the one hand, it's a great vehicle -- tremendous power, comfortable ride, decent mpg, etc. On the other hand, I haven't had a vehicle this unreliable since the variety of $500 cars I drove in high school.
Is 2018 just a crummy year and I should swap for something else?
Are these things really not built for driving in the mountains of Colorado? We don't use it that much (2018 with 37k miles now), but a fair number of the miles are family of 5 and our gear driving to go ski or camp or towing a light trailer with a raft on it (total weight less than 500 lbs, with usually ~50 on the tongue). So it's common for us to have 1000-1500 lbs of total passengers/payload/trailer weight and then drive it over a series of high mountain passes. But shouldn't that be workable for a truck-based SUV with 385 hp? We aren't really offroading (only a little bit of mild stuff that you could do in a subaru no problem). We don't want a mall-crawler. We want a truck.
