Often times a person will seek out to fellow enthusiasts about whether a particular product is good or not. This is indeed one of the best ways to find out more about a particular product based on personal experience; however, be mindful of the level of knowledge the person you are asking.
When it comes to quality of a wheel; a lot of you have heard a conversation similar to this:
"How do you like the wheels?"
"They are good. I've had them for a few years, took it to a few track days with no issues."
Generally a wheel is made to withstand normal use, but when an accident happens, can you trust the wheels you have on your car? Are the wheels on your car well engineered to take the impact?
Beyond the laboratory controlled test and test reports, which most of us don't really understand, we would like to show you some real world example of a well-engineered product. A quick Google image search "fake wheels" will show you all kinds of images shows cracked wheels. Look closely, and you'll notice all of those wheels have one thing in common; face has separated from the barrel of the wheel. When that happens, the hub of your vehicle will fall on the barrel of the wheel or worse onto the ground. You will lose traction at that corner and just hope for the best. A well-engineered wheel should let the lip or barrel of the wheel take the impact and not break apart on the face. The biggest difference between the two is that breaking the lip of the wheel allows you to control your vehicle and slowly come to a safe stop. This could be the difference between driving to the repair shop or totaling the car. Of course, in the extreme cases of forceful impact, even the best of the best die forged wheels will fail.
Most other cast wheel company will not show you pictures of their damaged product, but we will to demonstrate. The following images are sent to us by one of our customer. Another vehicle swerved into his lane causing his vehicle to hit the curb at 40MPH. Luckily the driver was not harmed; the wheels on the other hand was not so lucky. Although none of the spoke has any cracks, a chunk of the lip was taken out; surprisingly the wheel still held air even with the damaged lip, allowing the driver to come to a safe stop.
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