The three-wheel nut blues (car connoisseur quiz)
03/08/2025
Today, when almost all cars display their wheel bolts in alloy wheels, you don't have to puzzle over their number for long. Fastening with just three bolts is now almost extinct. From a purely geometric point of view, it is the ideal one, as even a wheel with five mounting points always warps minimally.
However, three-point mounting has finally eliminated an unsolvable problem. When tightening the bolts after a wheel change, you should not move from one to the next, but always skip one in order to keep the distortion as low as possible. However, on a Citroën 2CV, the nut after the next one is always a neighboring nut - which you are supposed to skip, making it impossible to tighten the bolts in theory.
So while today it is quite obvious how often you have to use the wheel wrench, in the days of full-surface wheel covers there was often a surprise hidden under the decorative cover. Of course, in the event of a flat tire, it doesn't matter whether you knew the number of bolts beforehand - you have to loosen them all anyway. Nevertheless, it's nice to know what to expect.
That's why we have selected ten cars where the wheel fastening is not immediately obvious. Would you like to give it a try?
Click here for car connoisseur quiz 172
