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Comment by bipson | Hacker News Reader

That really depends on your tire and rim.

Having low profile tires with light rims like those used on performance variants of Teslas and ID.3s/ID.4s/eTrons I would avoid curbs for sure.

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You should avoid that kind of thing regardless of the construction of your rims but to have one crack through such an interaction isn't normal. Rims are supposed to abrade or deform in such a situation, not crack and if they do crack that's a sign that the tire wasn't properly pressurized or that there was some kind of material defect. Hence my advice to check out the others because there may be more to this than 'just' an unfortunate interaction between the wheel and the corner kerb stones. Unless it was a particularly violent impact, of course. I've never had a rim crack under any circumstance in many, many kilometers over a lifetime of driving and if it happened on a relatively new design of a car I would immediately take it to the manufacturer, they may have overlooked something.

Honda had a similar thing happen in the 80's when they sold a new model and it turned out the tires didn't quite fit the rims as well as they should have leading to way too many blow outs (because the tires ended up being able to sit still while the rims rotated inside them, which ate up the inner ring of the sidewall).

We took it to the dealership, and they found the rim was cracked when the new tire was leaking air. None of the other tires have been losing air, so I assume the other rims are fine.

However to your bigger point, that the wheels are poorly engineered for their use, tracks. This is the first rim I've ever had crack, and I've even had some nasty accidents. This is however our first set of EVs (I have a Kia EV6), and I really feel like VW made a lot of compromises. (The UI/UX is the worst I've ever experienced in a car)

I've seen a lot of cars after accidents (bad ones) in various junk yards when hunting for parts, including ones where it was hard to figure out what brand the car was. In most of the cases, even with the wheel pushed all the way into the well they still held pressure so that's - in my view - very poor engineering. VW had a perfect storm of its own creation (the dieselgate, asleep at the switch when the energy transition started happening) that caused it to push their e-cars out on an accelerated schedule to avoid even further loss of market share, I expect that to eventually lead to some recalls. But to see it extend to something as basic as the wheels is very far out for their normal level of performance, that should have never ever happened. Would it be ok if I alerted someone in the org to your case?

Sure, I have no problem with that.

Ok, thank you. This could easily save lives so it matters.

Ok, done. I have no idea what if anything they will do with it but it has been passed on as well as enough details that they can contact you or the dealer if it should come to that. You didn't have an email in your profile so I gave them your linkedin link.

Best regards, Jacques

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