Driving home from work this afternoon I glance down at my radio to change the station and when I looked back up and there is a bumper in the fucking road. I try to swerve to avoid it but it was too late. I ran over it and busted my drivers side front rim. literally cracked the bastard in half.
So I put the donut spare on and limp home. I called my dealer up and asked how much for a new one. The quoted me a price of $610.00. I said no I just need one not a whole set. They said that is for one. After i picked my jaw up off the floor I said “ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME???!!! YOU FUCKING CROOKS!!”. And I hung up in disgust.
I know it was my fault for taking my eyes off the road but goddamn. I can probably find one at a scrapyard for cheap. but anyway. Just wanted to get that off my chest.
I love how the dealer price for a rim is almost 10% of the kelly blue book of the same car…are they going to carve it by hand out of a solid block of aluminum?
Hell, I have a nice set of Konig 5x100 15 inch wheels on my needs-to-be-junked Cavalier I’d sell for 500 bucks and that includes a nice set of tires with maybe 5000 miles on them. Six hundred for a single rim? That be bullshit right there.
Do you have a U-Pull-It or Pull-A-Part type junkyard around you? In my experience, they sell wheels for $10 to $25.
These are the places you have to go in and remove the part from the car yourself. They’re a lot cheaper because they don’t do the labor, or disassemble and catalog all the parts.
Pull-A-Part has an online database that will tell you which yard has your car and what row the car is in (although they list about 400 Cavaliers, not a single one is a 2004).
You might not be able to find a matching wheel, but you might be able to find 4 new (old) wheels for under $100.
thats part of the reason I always put plain black steel rims on every vehicle I own. They take abuse. Also, I usually modify my car to make it faster, more responsive and more agile. I do not modify it to look fast. not only do I find the fast and the furious plastic knick-nackery to be obscenely tacky, most of it does nothing to improve the vehicle itself. Also, it draws attention to you. I like a nice, quick, well tuned vehicle. I dont like every 19 year old with a honda that has a grapefruit launcher sticking out the ass end wanting to race me. I do my aggressive driving on real road tracks (motorsports ranch and eagle canyon…love those places,) not on the city streets or highways. the more mundane my car looks, the less I have the irritant of some hormonally driven kid with something to prove trying to get me to race. that being said, yeah, check junk yards, ebay and craigslist.
So I bought a Daewoo Lasagna, a four-door, from a teacher leaving the country. I checked it out and at some point he had misplaced the spare tire. So I went down to the Daewoo place.
The Parts Guy asked me if it was the aluminum of the steel wheel. I told him the steel one. The price was like US$75. For fun I asked how much the aluminum one was. He told me something like $500.
Alloy wheels are lighter than steel, sometimes remarkably so, and it’s all unsprung mass, so if you were really serious about the performance modifications you made, you’d probably want to switch out to alloys and just be man enough to resist the punks who want to race you because of your wheels (assuming those types of people even exist).
