Regrettably, everyone has gone chavtastic as far as cars are concerned. Everyone wants stupid, useless, lowered, "sports" suspensions. Everyone wants wide, skinny (low profile) tyres. Everyone wants ugly, bling upgrade or aftermarket wheels. That's what sells. Your car, if it's relatively new, will come with 17" diameter wheels as standard, at least. 18" is common. 19" is a common upgrade. More expensive cars now come with 20" diameter wheels as standard. Standard aftermarket wheels currently run to 22" diameter.
Someone should do the decent thing and sell the idiots penny-farthings or steam rollers; it's clearly what they want.
Here's why big wheels are dumb:
- They cost much more.
- They make your car accelerate more slowly. Oh sure, you may think you look cool, but all you've done is paid a lot of money to make your car slower and less comfortable. Josh Sadler, founder of Autofarm, Europe's longest-established Porsche specialists since 1973, once told me that the biggest simple improvement you could make to an old air-cooled 911 was to "drop her onto 15s". 1980s 911s were designed with 15" rims; but fashion victims even then were insisting on larger wheels and so many were fitted with 16" wheels in dealerships. But if you want to accelerate more quickly (surely a key consideration in a sports car), the advice from those who know what they're talking about is clear - get rid of the bigger wheels. Francis Tuthill Ltd, the well-know safari rally preparation company, echo that advice.
- By adding unsprung weight at each corner, they make your car less nimble.
- In order to preserve your car's gearing, the bigger the wheel, the shallower the side-wall on the tyre. Every inch you add to the diameter of your wheel means you have to take an inch off the sidewall of your tyre. You end up with something as moronic as this:
- Ultra-low profile tyres are little better than running on metal rims. Your car now jiggles and crashes on ordinary roads; dropping a wheel into a pothole is a seismic experience and your tyres will puncture much, much more.
- Lack of sidewall flex means that your car now gives you no warning when you've ran out of grip. Modern cars are well insulated. Say you're bowling along, stereo on, yakking on the phone, say a bend tightens unexpectedly, everythings seems fine and then bang! you're gone sideways, backways through a wall.
From a good article by Chris Harris:
"Who decided that suspension should no longer absorb bumps? Actually, I can answer that, it was the berks in the marketing department - but this fallacy of stiff springs and zero tyre sidewall has meant that virtually all new cars sold in the UK do not ride well. They are therefore not carrying out a basic requirement - to keep the occupants isolated from the road surface. That's like buying a £300 toaster, revelling in its build-quality, enjoying the control buttons and overlooking the small fact that it cannot heat white bread to the point that it hardens and turns light brown.
The only difference is that the car buyer tolerates cars that crash rigidly into cats-eyes, celebrates them even, but will return the toaster the moment they realised it didn't work."
Article here:
Economy, rust-proofing, passive safety, diesels - all hugely improved thanks to modern technology. However: suspension, handling, steering feel, feedback - all ruined by modern technology / fashion. The rot had set in by the late 90s. In the 80s, we caned our 1982 vintage family VW Santana unmercifully on our local rally roads. In all that 'hitting the rev limiter / airborne / fishtailing high jinks, we never once "bottomed out" the suspension. In the late 90s, I hired a C class Merc on a holiday home from London one Christmas, and nipped down the same back roads that our old VW had coped with so admirably a decade before. The Merc wasn't up to the job - crunch! graunch! wallop! thunk! - above a certain speed, its underside connected with every bump in sight. I couldn’t believe how bad it was. I hadn't driven that many Mercs before, but knew they had a reputation as being a "good car", but this was appalling. Sure, you might say there was no need to progress at that speed, but the point was a far older car of similar size from the early 80s could do it; 15 years of design "progress" later and the Merc couldn’t. Our current family car is a 3.0 TDI Quattro that the previous owner had, for reasons best known to himself, specced out with 19" rims and the fashionably low-slung "s-line" suspension. It's fast as anything, economical, grips forever
in bends, all the toys etc and looks well. But boy is it horrible on bad roads. We ended up retro-fitting the softer SE suspension and 17" A8 forged alloys. Still not stellar, but a significant improvement on the rubbish sold to you by modern Audi's marketing-led suspension dept. If the 90s Merc was bad, the even newer noughties A6, with another decade's worth of "design improvements" under its belt, is
even worse down those old roads; almost to the point where it’s un-driveable on them. Unless you're on a motorway, the suspension is comically inept - it's like being strapped to a washing machine on
spin cycle. I had the pleasure of driving an old 10V Audi quattro on 15" rims down the same roads recently, and the contrast between it and the A6 was almost shocking - how come that a company like VAG that had suspension travel nailed in the 80s has seemingly forgotten everything they ever knew? What the hell has gone wrong?
This rubbish is everywhere - all modern cars have wheels that are too big, tyres that are too low and suspensions that are "sporty". It's all nonsense, complete and utter nonsense and reveals modern drivers to be, well, stupid. That stuff only makes sense on a race track. On family and executive cars on real, pock-marked roads, it's close to insanity. Unfortunately, modern drivers love the macho looks of the big wheels etc and cars have been bad in this dept for so long now that, as with the poor quality of MP3 sound, most people don't know any better.
I also read an interesting article on how pedestrian safety requirements led to a greater amount of metal and bumpers fore and aft; result: bigger, slabby-looking car bodies needing larger wheel arches so as not to look out of place and obviously bigger and bigger wheels to fill them.
I also read an interesting article on how pedestrian safety requirements led to a greater amount of metal and bumpers fore and aft; result: bigger, slabby-looking car bodies needing larger wheel arches so as not to look out of place and obviously bigger and bigger wheels to fill them.
The sportiness that is closest to most road users is rallying - not track-days. Ironically, cars running a gravel set-up ride ride relatively tall, with plenty of compliance. Stiff and low set-ups work well on smooth tracks but are comically irelevant to most road users. You might as well fit an outboard motor to your car - face it, your large family or exec diesel will be on a racetrack about as often as it will feature in an underwater scene from a Bond movie. As you j-i-g-g-l-e along on your boy-racer suspension and pimp wheels, presumably you think it's all worth it for that .00003 of a second you'll gain per lap at Mondello or Silverstone or the 'Ring ...
I can't prove it, but I suspect that another hidden reason for the popularity of these dumb "sporty" dampers is that they're actually cheaper to produce than standard dampers. Unlike normal shocks, sporty shocks don't do much - they barely move. Cheap jiggly rubbish I bet you; and you've paid through the nose for it.
And, apart from everything else, there's the question of aesthetics - to me, a skinny tyre just looks unbalanced; and this perception is driven by common-sense. You know that low-profile tyres and big wheels are flawed in every way. They're the car equivalent of high heels - expensive, silly, and useless. This is the kind of visual balance that, nowadays, you only ever see in a museum:
One concluding thought - modern Formula 1 cars run on 13" tyres. Or perhaps cars that can push 200mph, hit 100mph in a few seconds and develop enough gs to rip your head off aren't "sporty" enough for you ...