How To Prevent Expensive Tesla Wheel Damage

hello everyone and welcome in this video we're going to be replacing the low-profile tires with large 20-inch wheels on my Tesla Model 3 with these right here these are 18 inch wheels with significantly higher profile tires on them and there's quite a few differences and some advantages quite a few advantages that you can get by switching over to a high profile tire with a smaller wheel so that's what we're gonna be discussing in this video and I'm also gonna be running some tests to see if there's actually any performance differences so we'll do some braking and some accelerating tests these are running the same tires both of them on a Michelin Pilot Sport for S tires however these are smaller wheels 18-inch vs. 20-inch so the sizes of these tires are different the width is the same both of them at two thirty five-millimeter alright so what inspired this swap in the first place well on a road trip hitting a pothole in my model three performance this thing destroyed it two wheels and two tires here is one of the wheels right here you can see this large crack in the wheel and so I wanted to prevent this from happening as much as possible and I also wanted to reduce the cost of destroying a wheel and tire if it were to happen again so this tire match with this wheel right here the tires about $340 the wheels are seven hundred ten dollars to replace so you're looking at about $1,050 in order to replace this wheel and tire so the whole thing all said and done hitting that pothole destroying two wheels two tires was over twenty six hundred dollars so that is where we landed on this right here so I started looking at you know how do I get into a smaller wheel because the Tesla Model 3 performance with Performance Package which it comes standard with only comes with these 20-inch wheels and once you have the performance package with these larger brakes you cannot use any of Tesla's other wheels the 18 inches the 19 inches and actually the 20 inches that they sell directly on their website don't fit so there is a specific 20 inch wheel just for the model 3 performance and that's your only option if you get the performance package with these performance brakes so ok I can't find a solution through Tesla so I started looking at the aftermarket what exists out there and one of the things that I was concerned about is if you look at this break there's only about a one inch gap between the caliper and the wheels so I thought well maybe I'm not going to be able to go down to an 18 inch wheel because of this caliper clearance hence you know perhaps that's why they only offer you this 20 inch wheel well that's not the case so T Sportline offers this 18 inch wheel so I started looking online for different options and T Sportline makes this it has the same 35 offset as the stock wheel and it offers you the ability to use the 18 inch original equipment tire size that the other Tesla Model 3 uses so it was excited about this because they claimed fits over these larger brakes and yet it's an 18 inch wheel so you can have a 45 percentage aspect ratio rather than a 35 aspect ratio on the tire so I got excited about that so what did I do well I reached out to T Sport Line and I said hey I just hit a pothole it cost $2,700 would you guys be willing to send some wheels and we'll see you know what the difference is between them are I chose these wheels this video isn't sponsored but I did reach out to them and say hey would you be willing to send wheels and thank you T Sportline they said yes we'd be happy to so they sent me these wheels so first let's talk about the tire sizes so with the original equipment tires here there are 235 over 35 with 20-inch wheels these aftermarket wheels and tires are 235 so the same width over 45 so a larger aspect ratio with 18-inch wheels and so what's the resulting difference well if you look at the wheel and tire versus where it falls to the ground so if you look at the width of that tire between the wheel and the ground with the original equipment tires it's just under 2 inches with these aftermarket wheels and tires it's 2.75 inches so you have 42 percent more sidewall here a 42 percent in greater distance between the wheel and the ground with these aftermarket wheels and tires and so why is that an advantage well you can think about it like a crumple zone so all cars have a crumple zone in front of you and that's to protect the driver and the depends of that vehicle so when you crash up against the wall or whatever it may be that crumple zone is going to reduce you know that peak deceleration that you're going to face because it's stretching out the deceleration over a certain distance so the longer your crumple zone is the safer those passengers are going to be so if you have no crumple zone whatsoever you know pretty much everyone would be dying every time they ran into something and it's kind of a similar idea with these wheels and tires so the smaller this sidewall is here the less distance you have let's say you hit that pothole really hard the less distance you have to slow down the car and that interaction from occurring and so because of that you're more likely to have that road actually impact the wheel and then you destroy it as you see right here so this has a larger distance to decelerate that interaction and so you have a less likelihood of destroying these wheels now that covers the first part of my goal which was to reduce the likelihood of getting wheel and tire damage the second part was to reduce the cost if it were to still happen so what does it cost now if I really get you know if I were to destroy a wheel and tire with this so this tire is about $230 this wheel is about $325 versus 710 and 340 so if I were to one-to-one destroy one versus the other this cost five hundred and fifty dollars to replace five hundred dollars cheaper than if I were to destroy the original equipment wheels and tires which is about 1,050 dollars to replace you can actually replace all four wheels and tires on this car with these right here for less than it cost me to replace two of these you know at a Tesla shop when I was on that road trip and destroyed two wheels and tires now another advantage of using these higher profile tires is that you're reducing the likelihood of curbing your wheels so it's something we all of course try to avoid but every now and then it does happen and it's a terrible feeling when it does and so thankfully you know with a bit more sidewall you reduce the likelihood of actually curving the wheel and also it just so happens these tires actually stick out a little bit more with these 18 inch wheels than how much they stick out with these 20 inch wheels and so on the other side of the wheel this isn't quite as important as you'll never really see it and it's less likely that it would rub against something but on these wheels the tire actually sticks out past the wheel on these actually the wheel sticks out past the tire so when I rest these Tesla wheels on the ground they actually rest on the metal not on the tire now it's worth pointing out the construction of these wheels so these are flow formed which isn't as strong or as light as a purely forged wheel however it is significantly less expensive than a forged wheel and it's also stronger and lighter especially in the barrel of this wheel versus a cast wheel so it has its advantages comes in at a better price point not as strong as forged but thankfully you know it's a little bit better of a process versus a cast wheel so let's talk about Wayne these twenty inch wheels are about thirty pounds these eighteen inch wheels are about twenty-one pounds so I weigh to both the wheel and tire combination of each these t Sport lines with Michelin ps4s tires came in at forty four point eight pounds and the Tesla wheel and tire combination came in at fifty three point four pounds so an eight point six pound difference per wheel and tire combo so overall thirty four point four pounds saved by switching to these which is great because not only is that unsprung mass but it is rotational mass now why do I get excited about removing unsprung rotational mass well unsprung mass is the mass of your vehicle that is not held up by the suspension so the suspension can only work to improve the ride quality of the mass that it's actually holding up the wheels and tires it's not actually holding so it can't change that it can't improve the ride quality if these are really heavy you come across above then that pushes a really heavy force up as that wheel moves upwards so if you decrease that weight of that wheel and tire you can improve the ride quality you want the ratio of sprung mass to unsprung mass to be as high as possible you want all sprung as minimal from mass is possible and that's for ride quality purposes now there's another advantage of going with a larger sidewall here and that's that your cycles actually act like a suspension so this tire it has suspension like properties and so the larger this sidewall the more compliant it's going to be the more ride comfort you're going to get out of it now I've taken out over thirty four pounds of unsprung mass and we have a larger sidewall and I went around and drove around on these to see you know can I actually feel the difference and I cannot so I'm not gonna say that it feels suddenly so much better as far as ride quality I can't tell the difference that said Tesla's tend to have very soft seats with quite a bit of cushion so it's kind of hard to see you know what's the whole car feel like it's doing when you're sitting on a very well you know very plush cushion underneath you so that kind of removes the vibrations the jolts and that kind of thing so perhaps if I remove the seat and just sat on the ground I might be able to tell but overall I wouldn't say that that would be the biggest reason for doing this because I can't actually personally feel a difference that said mathematically it will be superior to have lower unsprung mats now as far as rotational mass we can understand why it's important to have wheels as light as possible by understanding a wheels moment of inertia so love whatever inertia is a wheels resistance to rotational acceleration in other words spinning so we're not taking a mass and just taking it moving it from here to here instead we're taking that mass and we're rolling it from here to here like a wheel does and for a wheel this is a function of the wheels mass and the wheels diameter so the larger the diameter and the more it weighs the greater its moment of inertia and thus the greater resistance it has to accelerating so you can think about that like with this pen right here so if we spin this pen about this axis right here along the pen so the mass from this pen is all very close to that rotational axis it spins very easily and quite a few amount of times with just a short little flick of it now if we then spin it about this this where the mass is now further away from the center of rotation then it spins much slower it's harder to get it to spin very fast it's the same idea with ice skaters when an ice skater jumps up in the air and spins around they pull their arms in really close they spin out really fast and then right before they land it put out their arms in their leg and that slows down the rotation so they can have a nice easy landing so what we're trying to do is pull out mass so by pulling out those eight point six pounds from this and also reducing the distance that that weight is from the axis of rotation the center of the wheel we can reduce the amount of force required in order to accelerate these wheels so what is the actual difference in the moment of inertia of this 20-inch wheel versus this 18 inch wheel and honestly without the 3d model of this and doing a computer analysis you're not gonna have an exact number on but we can do a relative comparison to just kind of get some sort of an idea of what that difference might be and so a very simplified way of doing this is to distrain both of these as cylinders with an infinitely thin wall so there's zero thickness to the wall we just have all of the mass of this wheel at 20-inch diameter and all of the mass of this wheel at an 18 inch diameter now of course that's not fair because there's this whole face and we're just assuming all of that mass is that the outer edge which isn't true but this is just for a simple comparison to see you know does it make that much of a difference having the weight difference and the diameter difference of these so a moment of inertia of a hoop is equal to mass times the radius squared obviously because that raised is squared this is a function of the radius squared meaning that the moment of inertia increases dramatically when the radius increases so if we do the very simple math of this having you know a diameter of 20 or 18 inches and this one at 20 inches we do the math this one being at about 20 point five this one being in about 30 pounds then this has an increase in the moment of inertia of about eighty percent so you know it only weighs a little bit less than 50% more but because of that just small change in radius just one inch difference in radius a significant increase in the moment of inertia of this wheel and so that means you know what does that mean as far as accelerating well it resists accelerating significantly more than this wheel does which leads us to the question how much more and so that's what we're going to test so I'm gonna take these wheels I'm gonna put them on this car and I'm going to do some zero-to-sixty test to see what actually changes between 20 and verses 18 inch and having those different moments of inertia all right so here's where this gets really fascinating for me I love doing these kind of tests so we're doing 0-60 pulls we're gonna do three each with each tire same road same conditions and so we're gonna make sure that we try and get as accurate as possible we'll take the average of those three runs between each of the two wheel and tire sets and then see how they compare now I will admit I've pretty much failed you guys here because I looked at my cold tire pressures a couple days after doing the tests and I was at 43 psi with the aftermarket wheels and 42.5 you know if I was off by a whole half psi with the original equipment tire so huge advantage to those original equipment tires not really not a huge difference basically the same tire pressure in them same conditions tried to do that as fairly as possible what are our results well with the original equipment wheels and tires our average of those three runs zero to sixty was three point four two seconds our best run was three point four zero seconds now we compare that to this aftermarket how did we do that we actually improve yes so the average was three point three four seconds and the best was three point three two seconds so if you either look at the best or the average we improved our zero to 60 time which is already very quick at three point four seconds to three point three two seconds 0.08 seconds so actually a two percent difference in acceleration so point zero two g's greater acceleration using these versus using these now can I say that all conditions have been perfectly accommodated for what was the temperature of the battery was there at all any difference in wind any slight difference in temperature things like that no I can't account for all of it but I did the average of three runs I did my best to get them as close as possible and this was always faster and it averaged 0.08 faster than this tire and wheel combinations right here so very cool to see now you may also be wondering wait a minute Jason you're only getting three point three two seconds and when I look at current driver Motor Trend whoever they've gotten as low as 3.1 seconds with the model three performance and so that is a difference in how we are measuring zero to sixty so if you look at Car and Driver Motor Trend Road and track the way they measure zero to sixty is they start measuring after the vehicle has already moved a foot that's called rollout I start measuring at zero miles per hour so this is an actual zero to 60 rather than like a five to six miles per hour to 60 so the advantage that you will see with cars that use with zero to sixty times that use rollout that one foot where you exclude it will generally be about 0.2 to 0.3 seconds so you take point 2 to point 3 off of three point three to three point four and you're in you know the three point one a region that Motor Trend is getting with the acceleration on their vehicles so the numbers do match up and there was a two percent improvement which was repeatable so pretty fascinating to see by taking out mass and by reducing the rotational inertia of this wheel entire combination you do get a two percent improvement you also main wonder about in gearing because these are different sized tires right well they are within 1/2 of 1% 1/2 of 1% as far as the overall diameter of these two wheels so while this has a slightly better gear ratio it's only 1/2 of 1% difference so very similar as far as the actual diameter and the gearing the wheel torque they're going to have between these two so pretty much a direct comparison simply looking at a difference in wheel weight between these two alright so what about braking well very similar to accelerating I did three we're measuring 60 miles per hour down to zero miles per hour and we're measuring how far did I travel in order to stop completely so the average of three runs for the original equipment wheel and tire at 105 feet with the best braking distance at 104 feet and then with the aftermarket wheel and tire set the best was 106 feet with the average at 107 feet so actually two feet difference this one braked two feet longer this was a better braking wheel and tire here the original equipment one versus this aftermarket wheel and tire so 2 foot difference not a massive difference but a repeated measurable difference and so why might the aftermarket tire do worse than the original equipment tire so here we have the ps4s tire on the 20 inch wheel as you can see right here here we have the ps4s on the 18 inch wheel and I actually expected the original equipment tire to do better than the aftermarket ps4s and the reason being is because this is a Tesla specific tire so on the side of it it has a little tio indicating that this is the ps4s specifically for the model 3 performance designed hand-in-hand with Tesla where they said Michelin we want these changes to the tire for our specific vehicle this is a generic Michelin ps4s tire and so if you look at them you can actually see pretty distinct differences and so overall this has a much flatter shape the original equipment Tesla tire and the aftermarket the generic ps4s has a bit of a rounder shape to it also if you actually measure these Center ribs right here this is you know about maybe 1 and 1/16 one and 1/8 sorry one 1/8 inch and then the center up here is just one inch so each of these ribs here in the center is actually wider on the Tesla tire so you've got a larger contact patch and these grooves are also wider so how do they do that well they flatten the whole thing and kind of spread it out rather than having this more rounded shape here and so as a result of that you're gonna have a greater contact patch with this tire right here and so it has slightly better braking now I was surprised after you know kind of looking at the differences I mean the overall width of like what's touching the ground on this tire looks to be about eight inches versus the overall width on this tire looks to be about seven inches so it looks like a pretty significant difference between them yet the braking distance was only a two-foot difference so you know not that big of a compromise switching over to that lighter wheel with the generic ps4 tire another distinction this does have an acoustic liner inside so there's some foam inside of this wheel part of the cost difference there and as a result you know this is going to be a quieter tire can I tell the difference driving between the two no that's not to say that there isn't a measurable difference they wouldn't put it in there if it did nothing so part of me wondered okay is the fact that this is going to have you know more contact with the ground mean that you know as far as performance handling performance it's going to be sacrificed with this tire and I don't you know I don't have a way of directly measuring this but what I can say looking at these two tires is that I don't think there will be a big difference reason being is that as far as cornering performance that really comes down to this outer edge so the way Michelin designs this tire is this section right here this middle section up to the inside of the car this is a wet tread pattern so it's designed to have really good braking in wet conditions this outer portion here is a dry compound the compound is actually different from the outside versus the inside and this outer section is really about performance in the dry and if you measure and look at the differences between this dry section and this dry section they actually look nearly identical in the measurements come out very close so when you start you know rolling onto this shoulder because of heavy cornering the performance between these two tires looks like it would be very similar now what about aerodynamics and rolling resistance so is there a range difference between using this and using this obviously electric vehicles are very sensitive to efficiency changes because they're so efficient from the get-go and so will it impact range using this smaller wheel well of course from an acceleration standpoint yes because there's less mass to accelerate and then generally speaking smaller wheels are going to be more aerodynamic than larger wheels so both of these have a very similar design yet so you know this has this larger flatter section so if you were to think of just a straight flat wheel that would be more aerodynamic than having all these openings where you can create that turbulence in the air and so because this has a larger section where it's just purely flat it's going to tend to be a bit more aerodynamic will have a huge impact on range I don't know how much from Tesla their 18-inch wheels are their most aerodynamic with those aero caps and then it just gets significantly less aerodynamic as you go to the 19's and then the 20s the 20-inch wheels that come standard on the model 3 performance are the least aerodynamic wheels that Tesla puts out so I would expect that these are going to be an improvement in aerodynamics as far as rolling resistance this does look like it has a slightly smaller contact patch so maybe a slight difference in rolling resistance but really we've got the same compound here it's the same tire just slight tweaks for the Tesla version so I anticipate that rolling resistance will be pretty much the same between them a slight improvement in range simply from having a bit better aerodynamics with these smaller wheels now three things I particularly like about these t Sport Line wheels first of all they use the factory lug nuts here so same bolt pattern and factory lug nuts you can use directly on these you can also pull out that Center cap and just use an OE Tesla Center cap so it can give you that nice OE appearance which I really appreciate that they do and then also these use factory Tesla TPMS sensors and so what's cool about this is that Tesla actually makes it really easy to switch over to aftermarket wheels and I got to give props to Tesla for doing this because it's insane how simple it is you simply put the new wheels on you go for a drive as you're driving it says hey we rack nice new TPMS sensors would you like to recalibrate you say yes you select which size wheel you have 18 19 or 20 inch wheels and then it just does it all for you done you don't have to do any programming anything like that it automatically recognizes that you switch to different wheels and tires you just simply tell it which diameter your wheels are and then it reprograms the car for those and you can read your tire pressures once again so very cool how easy it is to switch over and I like that you can pop these out put in the Tesla ones and have a very OE looking wheel now speaking of looks here's where we get to the subjective portion of this video and that is to me I like the look of sidewall I think these look great I think it's really cool to have that meaty sidewall on the wheel and you know I'm not a huge fan of these super thin like rubber band style tires and so it was a sacrifice that I made because I wanted to go with the performance package in the model 3p and this is the only wheel and tire combo that they offered but I really do like the look of it and why do they do you know these really thin wheels with these are really thin tyres with these large wheels I can't think of any reason except for aesthetics and so obviously you know the majority of people out there probably have to think that this looks better than this and reason being is because everyone does it you see it so commonly on really nice cars they're all using these really tiny little tires that are super sensitive to potholes and it's not exciting I've talked with people from Motor Trend from current driver whenever they have vehicles like the Civic type-r or you know Jaguars with huge wheels on them they're running into tire punctures and they're running into wheel damage far more frequently than if they have the higher profile tires on it so not only do I you know appreciate that it's a better real entire combination from a performance standpoint but also that I do I really do I like the look of sidewalls so I know not everyone does hence the industry goes this direction but I think they look great and you know thank you all for watching this has been really fascinating to learn about the differences between the two so if you do have any question or comments of course feel free to leave those below

Channel: Engineering Explained

Views: 619,904

Rating: 4.882937 out of 5

Keywords: tesla, tesla wheels, tesla model 3, tesla model 3 wheels, tesla 18 wheels, tesla 20 wheels, tesla model s, tesla model x, low profile tires, tire sidewall, michelin, michelin ps4s, michelin tires, pothole damage, tesla pothole, tesla pothole damage, engineering, science, technology, engineering explained

Id: zqFT0tsusUY

Length: 26min 19sec (1579 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 04 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/twinbee]

Brilliant video, so informative.

I like the way the new 18" wheel+tire combo will be less likely to suffer from curb rash due to the sidewalls. I wish Tirerack specified this attribute.

Summary (SPOILER):

18" pros:

• Technically less jolty ride (but he didn't notice any difference)

• 0.08s faster 0-60 time (18" 3.34s versus 20" 3.42s)

• Significantly less chance of pothole damage due to 40% extra tire sidewall height.

• Less chance of curb rash due to beefier sidewall.

20" pros:

• 2 foot less stopping distance (60-0mph) from hard brake: 105 foot versus 107 foot.

• Technically quieter due to the insulating foam (but he didn't notice any difference).

[u/Kaelang]

The 18's just look too small. I know it's subjective and apparently he likes the look, so that's fine, but I'm inclined to split the difference and go 19.

Also, his comparison of the 20's to 18's moment of inertia is not really a good comparison. The actual width of both wheel and tire combos amount to the same, so while the outer circumference of the wheel is closer to the middle, there's still the outside of the tire which is the same distance from the center. I'm surprised he disregarded that fact.

[u/croninsiglos]

What I want to know about is the steering feel. With a smaller contact patch and larger sidewall, I'd expect the 18s to feel a bit more sluggish.

[u/YOUREABOT]

Steelies are the best wheels ever if you want no scrapes or dents

[u/TesSCCM]

Is there anyway to order the Model 3 Performance with the 19inch tires instead of the 20? I've never been a fan of low pro tires and would like to avoid them.

[u/twinbee]

Although he said there wasn't much difference in ride comfort with the 18" wheels, one thing worth bearing in mind is that it may be possible to run the 18" tires at a lower more comfy PSI (say 39psi) without worrying about pot holes. With the 20" wheels/tires, you'll want a normal or higher PSI to negate the pot hole issue.

[u/0bviousTruth]

IMO 18's are too small on P3D+. With 18" wheels there are only a few millimeters of space between the large red Brembo rear caliper and the barrel of the wheel.

[u/MeccIt]

He has freaky long arms.

Also nice video explaining why low-profile wheels are an expensive con.