Alloys Raise Safety Concerns
If you are one of those drivers who makes a practice of bashing into curbs while parking, you might not want to invest in an expensive set of alloys.
Some experts are less than enthusiastic about the longevity of alloys in general, and they voice concern about their tendency to sustain damage from abrasion and their problems holding air pressure in tires.
An equally great concern involves the efficacy of repairing damaged alloy wheels.
Replacing a damaged or defective alloy wheel with a new one can be expensive. They can range from about $100 apiece for a really basic model to well over $500 for a complex design. Alloys come as standard equipment on about 60% of new cars.
Many companies, large and small, sell repaired alloys, taking your damaged wheel in exchange and later repairing and reselling it. In many cases, these repair businesses are providing replacements that had only cosmetic damage, such as scuff marks. But they also sell wheels that have been repaired after being cracked or bent.
A consumer has no way to know how much damage a remanufactured rim had sustained.
Whether it is safe to repair a bent rim is questionable.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has little to offer. The agency’s Web site could not locate a single document dealing with the issue. It does not have standards governing either the manufacturing or the repair of alloys.
“In general, we do not regulate repairs,” a spokesman said. Consumers basically are on their own.
Clarence Ditlow, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety, said alloy wheels generally lack consistent quality and often are subject to fractures. Ditlow said the center has received reports of alloy wheels that are unable to retain air pressure. In cold climates, tires mounted on alloys with a poor seal can lose significant pressure in as little as one week.
Millions of damaged alloys are repaired each year at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, industry sources say. Insurance companies, for instance, often will specify that body shops use repaired alloy wheels, rather than new ones, when doing collision repairs.
But most consumers’ problems with alloys result from road damage from potholes, curbs or debris.
A typical complaint came to Your Wheels from a Tustin couple, who wrote that their 2000 Mazda MPV minivan began vibrating at high speeds. After some unnecessary repairs, including an alignment, the vibration was traced to a dent in an alloy wheel.
A major national tire chain estimated the wheel would cost $400 to replace. A smaller tire dealer offered to repair it for $250. Finally, the couple had the wheel fixed by an independent repair operation for $100.
The repair industry includes small shops that do little more than sand scuff marks off wheels and very large corporations that operate factories that perform major repairs.
Transwheel Corp., which describes itself as the largest vendor of repaired alloy wheels in the country, annually repairs about 150,000 of them, according to Jim Devlin, general manager of operations.
Devlin said the company does repair cracks and dents, but within strict limits, and has developed its own internal standards to determine the severity of damage that can be safety repaired. Devin said the company removes up to 20 thousandths of an inch of metal in some resurfacing operations, using computer-controlled machines.
Independent tests, he said, have shown that wheels repaired to such standards meet requirements set by car makers and by the Society of Automotive Engineers. But such assurances do not satisfy everyone.
Ken Zion, owner of Automotive Collision Consultants, a private accident investigation company in Long Beach, expressed concerns about the use of repaired alloy wheels. In some cases, remanufacturing companies have taken excessive amounts of aluminum off the wheels when resurfacing them, leading to failures, he said.
Zion also said he has had many tire-leak experiences with alloy wheels, though none with steel wheels. In general, Zion said he would not recommend purchasing repaired alloy wheels without knowing the history of the wheel and the identity of the repair company.
Although many motorists think about tire safety in these post-Firestone recall days, wheel safety isn’t such a hot topic. Still, alloy wheels can and do fail, resulting in a loss of control just as severe, if not more so, as if a tire had blown out.
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Ralph Vartabedian cannot answer mail personally but responds
in this column to automotive questions of general interest. Write to Your Wheels, Business Section, Los Angeles Times, 202 W. 1st St., Los Angeles, CA 90012. E-mail: ralph.vartabedian@latimes.com.
