Geek Out! Trimming the wheel

There are certain things almost guaranteed to get car people mildly excited. Fast estates, for example. Or minimalist lightweight sports cars. And to that list in recent years we’ve been able to add something else; steel wheels. Look at the love given to Fiat’s new Grande Panda because you can have it on steelies. Or the nods of approval directed at its platform-mate, the new Vauxhall Frontera, because it too can be had with white-painted wheels of steel.

Some of this might have been triggered by the current Land Rover Defender which went on sale in 2019 with the option of some very smart, also white-painted steel rims. Getting these to production required Land Rover engineers to dig out their old internal specs for steel wheel strength since it was so long since they’d offered any of their cars with anything but alloys. I’ve heard that these rims were the favoured wheel of the Defender design team which nicknamed them ‘Steely Dans’ but customer uptake has never been massive, even now the original steel has been joined by a larger but almost-identical-looking alloy which, unlike its sibling, clears the larger brakes on more powerful models.

In fact, customer uptake of steel wheels is never especially strong. Like fast estates and minimalist lightweight sports cars, they’re something car fans like to wax about but which frequently struggle to find favour with paying punters. In the case of steel wheels, this is almost certainly because they’re seen as a bit basic. In an era when almost everything comes on alloys, someone into self-image but not so much cars might perceive a plain steel wheel as signalling to the neighbours that this is all they could afford.