Volt Fix Garage

Short Answer: A creak like an old mattress, or a dry squeak when you turn the wheel at parking-lot speed or roll over a speed bump, is most often a dry, corroded front upper control arm (FUCA) ball joint. It can show up on a Model 3 of any year once the miles add up, but it is most common on 2018–2020 cars, which is why Tesla wrote service bulletin SB-20-31-006: water can find a path into both upper ball joints, cause surface corrosion, and make the suspension creak. Tesla calls it a noise-only condition, not a safety failure. Your options: a grease-needle injection that owners use as a temporary silencer (roughly $10–$25 in supplies), Tesla Service replacing both arms (owner reports range from about $200 when labor is waived to $570–$650 when it isn't), or a DIY swap to the latest Tesla arms or MEYLE HD arms (around $350 for the pair) plus an alignment check. My Model 3 is a June 2020 build with a little over 76,000 miles on it, running HW3 and the Intel Atom infotainment comp...