Watch out for potholes!
07/14/2019
I recently watched a YouTube video in which a Tesla 3 driver complained about two broken rims after being unable to avoid a medium-sized pothole (much smaller than the one pictured) on a well-traveled American road. He attributed the rim breakage to the very low tires and minimal suspension travel of his Tesla 3 Performance model. The damage, including towing, amounted to around USD 3000.
Potholes and bad roads have always existed, but the cars of the past coped with them much better than modern vehicles with ultra-low profile tires, huge rim diameters and super-stable chassis designs.
In the past, the suspension travel was longer, the tires were higher than they were wide and even the chassis helped to survive a pothole without worse consequences.
And it is not primarily the required driving safety that makes modern cars so vulnerable, it is primarily visual and aesthetic demands that have nowadays established 19-inch wheels with 40 or 45 tires almost as standard equipment on mid-range cars. However, the possible driving performance due to the high horsepower engines also helps, because these lead to huge brake disks, which require correspondingly large rim diameters.
So, if we were to scale back a little, we could build more practical cars again. If someone would buy them ...
