[MWPos]

I drive with my windows down at every opportunity, but my car has had a rattle in the rear seat shelf or headliner area that has been really annoying. I banged around on the rear seat shelf area and found nothing that seemed to be the culprit, then I did the same in the headliner area and thought I found the problem to be that the plastic housing for the brake light had some freedom of movement. Its clips were holding it in place, but not tightly against the headliner. My guess was that with the windows down, the turbulence in that area was making it flutter and create the noise I could hear from the front.

I removed it by following some instructions I found through a Google search. Summarized, start at the rear edge and pull downward. There are two clips at the sides close to the rear edge of the panel. Once those two rear clips are freed, then pull the panel rearward to disengage the two front clips. None of the clips are built such that you need a special tool to release them.

It was so easy I did not even bother to take pictures.

Lo-and-behold, I found that someone, the original owner or dealer, had also been annoyed enough by the noise to attempt a fix. Their fix had been to wrap the clips in a light layer of cloth. The thin cloth did not stop the panel from buffeting in the wind, so the noise was still there when I got the car.

I removed their cloth job and put a strip of old 1/4" weather stripping around the perimeter of the upward-facing panel edges and anywhere I thought the panel would make contact with the headliner.

I popped it back in and had hope that my solution would work because I had to press firmly upward to compress the weather stripping and engage the clips.

A test drive with the windows down at speeds up to 80 (oops, I meant 65) revealed that my $0.20 solution had worked. I hope this helps anyone who is nagged by that same annoying plastic rattle noise from the rear of their car!