Would anyone know what this sound is coming from? When I’m at a stop and rock my steering wheel, it makes this sound. It will go away after a few seconds. It sounds like it’s coming from the steering column. I took it to the dealership and they can’t figure it out.

 

Very good that you've recorded this for validation / evidence. I hope your car is still under warranty and that the dealer created and gave you an invoice that spelled out your issue for your records.
That's a puzzling sound, plus it goes away too.

To help out your cause you may do some more analysis on the how when where questions to help out your dealer.
When does it happen, only when stopped and not moving? Every time or intermittently?
Do you feel a loose clunkiness in the steering wheel when it does it? Like there's some play in it?
Was the dealer able to replicate the issue?
Did they look at all the mechanical connections in the steering column to see if any were loose or damaged? You can get at them directly under the steering wheel dash area.
Did they look at the steering rack and connecting linkages found under the vehicle for signs of being loose or damaged?

If your dealer is being passive about this you need to push them to resolve the issue, that's not normal for it to make that sound and needs to be corrected, you could possibly have something coming loose in your steering system which could be dangerous.
Has the dealer said what they will do next?

 

To me it sure sounds like play in one or more of the tie rod joints

 

I notice the sound disappeared just as the engine shut down. Is there any correlation or was that just coincidence?

 

You also have a 'press brake more to activate' notification that comes up. Not sure what that was for, was it your cruise control? What systems did you have active when you took the video?

 

That was the auto stop/start activation. Boooo! LOL

The reason I noticed it, because when the engine shuts down like that, voltage drops off as the alternator takes a snooze. I was just pondering if a voltage fluctuation would make the electric steering to do weird stuff. I was watching a diagnostics video on YouTube and the guy had a really interesting situation. The car he was working on would run on 4 cyl completely normally when the alternator was disconnected, but as soon as the alternator was connected the car would only run on 2 cylinders with misfires and stuff. The owner had replaced the alternator with no change. The diag guy did all kinds of tests and found that even connecting a battery maintainer would cause the car to go from runing perfectly fine on 4 cyl to misfiring. Battery tender at 12V, good, 12.5V good, 13v good, 13.5V and the engine would start misfiring and running on 2 cyl, WTF! He eventually discovered the ignition coils would go berserk at charging voltage, but worked ok on battery voltage. Just got my thinking if a voltage difference occured everytime this noise came about, perhaps a defect within the power steering rack. Just a guess, curious!

 

Droid would that have been Royalty Auto Service in Georgia? This guy's brain has to be wired extra special! The things he manages to find with his scanning devices is truly out of this world!

https://www.youtube.com/@theroyaltyautoservice/featured

 

I watch him too, but the guy I'm referring to is Pine Hollow Diagnostics. He pretty much specializes in advanced engine diagnostics, similiar to Check Engine Chuck if you've seen his stuff.

Edit: I've become quite fascinated with advanged engine diag. Back in the 80s when I started my career in IT the computers in cars were so basic it was not interesting to me, but these days with very complex networks in cars with sometimes dozens of modules all communicating on the networks (and interfering with each other when stuff goes south). I think if I was starting my career now I would seriously consider taking this up. I've troubleshooted a lot of network issues but this is such an interesting combination of my interest in computer networks and cars.

 

Sorry, back to the point you were making. Your thoughts make sense, I mean if it were a truly mechanical only issue it seems unlikely it would go away, he would be hearing the clunking whenever he made changes with his steering wheel or over bumps. It seems it would be some effect on the electric rack control and possibly doing a quick 'left push, then right push' scenario where the electronics are asking the mechanical control to change direction very fast leading to the noise.