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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

What's the upside from bigger wheels? There must be a reason they make them bigger for more-premium cars.

Looks. Primarily at least, until you get into ultra-performance vehicles not really built for driving on public roads.

I recently upgraded to my "dream" daily driver car that came with 22" rims from the factory. It's definitely the worst part of the vehicle. Unfortunately I can't go much smaller, as 21" are the smallest that fit over the giant brake calipers.

Due to the weight of the vehicle, the larger brakes are likely needed - but the difference between this "performance" version of my car vs. the "luxury" version built on exactly the same body/chassis but with 19" wheels is night and day for day to day ride quality on poorly maintained city streets.

Once you get on fresh blacktop on the highway and start taking corners at a high rate of speed it's a different story, then the car just glides and "sticks" to the road super well due to the giant (wide) wheels. But that accounts for perhaps 5% of my driving if that.

buying the car and fitting smaller rims on it is too obvious, so there must be something I'm missing

It really depends on the size of the brakes. The real reason to fit bigger wheels is to clear larger brakes for better stopping power. Usually a higher performance trim level will have larger brakes to make up for the extra speed or weight. But that became a styling trend that just trickled down in a lot of cases to "it looks cool" because you see it on so many performance cars. Many cars now have gigantic wheels that can easily be downsized.

I know a couple people who have done it. You get much better ride because you have taller sidewalls, and you're much less likely to destroy a tire when you hit an object. These massive wheels on cars now are totally ridiculous.

Aesthetics.

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