I'm on winter #3 with this car. Winter '00-'01 had a lot of snow in NE and a couple times I noticed a weird sound. While driving in deep slush/wet snow on the highway I got an intermittent loud whine emanating from the front. It only happened a couple times and only when in really deep wet stuff. (When you hear it jetting up inside your wheel wells). It never happened after those couple times, and would not happen in deep dry snow or heavy rain.

Last winter it never happened so I forgot about it.

The other day I was driving on a back road in VT during really heavy wet snow. All of a sudden it started happening again. I slowed down and it dropped in pitch with my speed. I stopped, it stopped. I accelerated, it came back for a minute then went away. A few minutes later it came back. Then it finally went away.

I was able to determine that it varied in pitch with the actual wheel speed, not engine RPMs. I also activated the ABS and that had no effect either. I accelerated hard to make sure the AWD was working hard, no effect. Other than the noise, the car was acting as expected.

The noise sounded a lot like a table saw that is not cutting anything but still spinning. Almost like a high frequency metal vibration, or God forbid, high speed gears not meshing and just barely grinding against each other.

The only thing I could think of that was not horrible was that the heavy slush had built up around the flimsy brake rotor cover and was causing a vibration until it melted away.

Anybody know anything about this?