Why black wheels?
05/10/2025
At some point in the new millennium (?), black rims appeared. Soon you could order production models with black wheels from luxury car manufacturers. And today, black is the standard option on many new cars; if you want silver wheels, you have to at least deviate from the standard, perhaps even order larger wheels.
There are hardly any practical advantages to black (usually glossy) rims, on the contrary. It's probably primarily for design reasons, apparently black wheels make the car look more massive.
From my point of view, however, wheel arches become black holes due to the lack of contrast between tires and rims. In addition, you can hardly see the (perhaps) elegant design of the black wheels. And after the first contact with the curb, black rims suffer (visually) even more than aluminum-colored or silver wheels.
Will the trend towards black wheels soon take over the youngtimer scene? You can already see first-generation Porsche Boxsters with black rims. Presumably the time is not far off when we will also see classic cars with black wheels.
To be fair, it has to be said that there were black rims much earlier, but they were covered by wheel covers or hubcaps. And Porsche also liked to paint the inner part of the Fuchs rims in (matt) black, something that motivated some Golf drivers to also paint the inner part of their steel wheels matt black.
And in the fifties, the Volkswagen had rims in body color, which ten years later was already considered rather old-fashioned. Spoked wheels with spokes painted in the same color as the car were also fashionable at times. Yes, trends came and went.
P.S. And what do our readers think about black wheels? Just leave your comments, we'd love to hear them!
