Weird sound started coming from Tesla

[Meelosh123]

Hello, I attached a recording of a sound that started coming from my Tesla recently.  Sorry for the poor quality; hopefully you can hear the oddity.  Early this week it started as an odd knocking/clicking sound.  Riding around today it turned into this higher pitched whine, which increased in pitch at the same rate as the normal motor sound when accelerating. 

The only thing going on that's different is that the temperature has dropped a lot this week, and I pumped the tire to around 50 psi to try it out.  Lowering the pressure back to 40-45 had no effect.

So this has me pretty worried.  However, today, while trying to get a recording and stopping and starting, I had the idea to ride the wheel backwards for a little while, and the sound went away.  When I stopped and started riding it forwards again, the sound wasn't there.  Any ideas?  I'm trying to prevent some catastrophic failure happening when I'm riding and far from home.

tesla-whine.m4a

[meepmeepmayer]

My guess: something got stuck in the wheel well (clicking), lodged itself somewhere and rubbed (pitch) and finally fell out (sound gone). Does this sound plausible?

Can you say if it sounded electrical? I don't think now that it is gone you have to worry, electronics either work or don't. But you can open the wheel and check if everything looks good (maybe post a photo).

[Marty Backe]

I've never heard of motors that start making a whining sound like like. Yet from your little experiment, sounds like maybe a twig got stuck in the shell and you were hearing the rubbing sound.

[HarpMudd]

That definitely sounds like some debris got caught up inside.  I once had a leaf inside mine and riding around would not get rid of it.  I ended up lying my wheel on its side, and had to use a flashlight and various tools to pull it out.