Wheel Bearing Warranty Analysis Trends and Countermeasures

Wheel bearing warranty in the market has gained an increased amount of attention over the last decade by most vehicle OEMs. In addition, the needs of electric and autonomous vehicles put new life and robustness requirements on wheel bearing assemblies. Detailed warranty analysis of failure modes is required to determine root causes of field failures in order to recommend potential countermeasures. In the field there exist failure modes such as sealing failures, impact damage, fretting, material fatigue failures and perceived "no Trouble Found" parts. This oral presentation will explore and describe the mechanism of some of these field failure modes as well as detailing some of the potential countermeasures that can be applied. The warranty analysis procedure of creating investigative documents and failure distributions will be reviewed as well as predictive analysis of implemented countermeasures to determine the countermeasures effectiveness in the field.