Will exhaust noise do damage to my car?

[Abe Orabi]

An incompetent AAA tow truck driver bent my muffler out of whack. The car is loud and making all sorts of crazy rattles. Until I get the exhaust system replaced, will this amount of noise, rattling, vibration, etc. do any considerable damage to other parts of the car? Is it a safety concern?

Topic

[Mike]

The simple answer, I’ve never seen any real damage get done by a bent or improperly fitted exhaust rattling against the body or suspension. You can definitely deal with it for a bit.

What will happen that you may want to consider is that whatever areas the exhaust is rattling against will likely have the paint chafed off pretty quick. In a perfect world, you’d have those areas touched up with paint after the exhaust is fixed. In most cases, it will be chafing paint off of thicker subframe or suspension part metal. Sometimes it will hit against the underbody sheet metal, which might turn into a rust hole that lets water/moisture into the car after several years. Of course your username is basically Arab and your avatar looks like a Camry, which suggests that you may be using the car in a desert. If that is the case, you can pretty much disregard any concerns of the rust problems I mentioned.

[Abe Orabi]

I’m actually a full blooded Caucasian living in the American north east, so rust is definitely a concern. Thanks for the reply and the worldly insight.

[Donald]

Wouldn’t be to worried about rattles. Its more annoyance than anything.

[Author]

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