A Detail To Celebrate: Color-Coded Wheel Covers Are One Of The Best Ways To Class Up A Car

I’ve always been someone interested in little details. There’s that quote from the famous modernist architect Mies van der Rohe about how “God is in the details” but I always confuse that with the modern idiom “the devil is in the details,” and the truth is that if you asked me, at sharpened screwdriver-point to explain just what the hell that means, I’m not sure I could. Still, what I do know is that I love automotive details, and this time I want to talk about one that is largely gone from the modern automotive landscape, which I believe is a crucial factor in society’s severe drop in classiness levels over the past four or so decades. The detail? Body-colored wheel covers.

Don’t believe me? Think I’m overstating things? Well maybe this chart from the National Organization for the Preservation and Advancement of American Classiness (NOPAAC) will convince you:

Look at that! There is a clear and direct correlation between the vanishing of body-colored wheel covers from America’s roads with the dizzying and precipitous drop in classiness levels, from their 1968 peak at nearly 4,200 KiloSwanks to their miserable showing today, at a mere 224 KiloSwanks per square hectare [Editor’s Note: Wait a second, if there were a clear relationship, wouldn’t you expect some kind of inflection point when the last body-color hubcap went away? Hmm, the data seems dubious, but continue on. -DT]. You can’t just open up Photoshop and quickly slap together a chart like this and make up some absurd organization — this is real, hard data backing up my point: color-coordinated wheel covers or hubcaps are deeply and powerfully classy things, and the abandonment of them by the global carmaker cabal has horrifically impacted classiness levels all over the nation.

Can we ever recover? Who knows. I hope so. Perhaps raising awareness of this problem is the first step, so allow me to provide some examples of how wonderful body-colored wheel covers are. The best known practitioner of this deeply elegant affectation is likely Mercedes-Benz, who offered color-coordinated wheel covers across a number of models from the late 1960s to well into the 1980s:

Tell me that’s not a fantastic look! Tell me! Why are we so gripped by the monochrome menace of grayscale wheels for pretty much every car you can get today? Sure, there’s sometimes black wheels or white wheels, but the vast majority of wheels are silver or gray or some miserable bland shade of putty-oatmeal-asphalt-leaden sky nothingness?

Matching wheel color to car body color is harder, yes. It takes more time and more coordination, and the manufacturer can’t just shit out some universal gray wheels that work on anything, they have to pay attention, and make special wheels or wheel covers for every different color they offer. It takes caring, which is at the essence of why they’re so damn classy.

And if you still don’t believe me, look at all these cars that once offered body colored wheels; many were not classy cars at all, and yet once this quartet of matchy-matchy accessories were applied, the KiloSwank readings of every car absolutely skyrocketed. Here’s some examples:

Was a Renault LeCar classy? I mean, it has a French name, so that helps, but what also helps are those fetching body-colored wheel covers on the yellow one there! And the green one at the back! It’s just so…together!

Let’s look at another car not normally associated with classiness:

A Ford Pinto! Is it still an entry-level econobox with a dangerously cataclysmic design flaw when it looks this good on those wheels? I don’t think so!

Look, even perennial cheapskates AMC even got in on the action, transforming the grubby sweatshirt that was the AMC Hornet into the dry cleaned and pressed tuxedo T-shirt of the Concord! And you can thank those fabulous red hubcaps!

Look at this Granada; normally a pile with delusions of grandeur, but add some body-colored hubcaps and all of a sudden things seem less delusional, right?

Oh, if you forgot about the delusions of a Granada, it’s always fun to be reminded:

There’s more, though; for a while, the body-colored wheels were a known and respected path out of mundanity. The Plymouth Valiant (and its sibling the Dart) did it:

And GM wasn’t missing out, either, with the Nova getting some classy color-coded wheels:

That guy looks a lot like Matthew Mcconaughey, doesn’t he?

It’s uncanny! Oh, and GM also gave this gift unto Oldsmobile, for the Delta 88:

There are more examples, of course. And on a personal note, I even painted the wheels of my own Beetle to match the body color, gaining an increase of hundreds of KiloSwanks:

Now, I’ve talked to some people about body-colored or color-coordinated wheels or wheel coverings, and some have stated that they do not like them, that they feel they are “cheesy” or “too much” or some other inane whatever. To people who feel this way, I can only suggest that you seek out your clergyperson or perhaps a mental health professional to help steer you back onto the Path of Truth, because, it pains me to say, you have wandered.

I hereby challenge a modern, mainstream automaker to offer body-coordinated wheels again. It’s far past time to break the stranglehold of grayscale wheels, and I’m confident that the resulting increase in our nations classiness levels will pay for the added efforts many, many times over.

Stay swanky, friends.

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