What causes Control Arms to go bad?

We get a lot of questions about control arms and we're working on some today so I thought I’d address that. Welcome to Mercie J Auto care, where compassion and craftsmanship come together. I'm Rick Smith, master certified technician. Now this is a control arm and most of control arm failures are in the bushings. So you have rubber bushings on two places as shown in the video. On this particular car, this is the most common bushing that fails. First of all be careful about condemning these too soon. You can have cracks in the bushings just from weather, but if they’re not moving around too much, then they don’t need to be replaced. If you do have a failure like in this case where the bushing (I pulled this out of the other control arm) is completely torn. This should be one piece, but this is the inner part of the bushing and the outer part of the bushing. At that point you have choices. You can either replace the control arm which will come with new bushings or in this case on Toyotas and Lexus, I recommend that you get an updated bushing that doesn’t have rubber all around it. It’s more like a joint. By replacing that, we press this bushing out of the control arm. By putting a joint in here, rather than bushing, it will last a lot longer and in the long run, cost our client a lot less money. So I hope that helps you understand a little bit more about control arms and what you can do to resolve them. Until next time, safe travels and blessings to you.