I just bought a set of 4 8x18" alloys, Borbet bs5s, for £268.  OK they were half price but it had made me think ( maybe I should have right this earlier) why are some alloy wheels so expensive?  Those Bobets are less then 1/4 the cost of some similar size wheels, the Geminis on my octy for example.  Okay they may be inflated main dealer prices, but there are after market rims at £1200 a set too.  Is there for reason, or is a lot of it just the branding?

Branding and the the price some idiots will pay to have different wheels from others..hmm!! 

Back in 2007 Honda were asking £325 for a 16x6.5 wheel for the Honda Civic I then owned.  I purchased a wheel that looked almost identical for £95 including delivery and a set of bolts and a centre cap.  However, a couple of years ago a replacement 16x6 wheel from Renault for my wife's Clio was less than £150.  So, yes, I do think some car manufacturers have a high mark up on their alloy wheels. 

 

Aren't almost all alloy wheels fitted to new cars bought in from specialist alloy wheel suppliers?  Many years ago I did work for a company called Eurocast, based in South Wales, which supplied wheels to many car manufacturers and also marketed some aftermarket alloys under a trade name (I have forgotten what it was).  Many of the cars in the employees' car park had fancy alloys that you would not usually see on that model of car as the company sold wheels to employees at huge discounts (75% in many cases).

There are wheels and wheels

It could be weight, it could be the manufacturing process, it could be the finish, it could be all sorts of things

+1 ^^^ though someone posted a thread about black neptunes the other day on here - same rims, with different part numbers as the prices were very different with the 'accessory' part number being the cheapest. There was a similar thing going on with mk2 octy rear wheel mudflaps with one having a squarer profile than the other. Again the difference between the accessory and the other was significant so it's always worth checking if there's 2 prices Skoda are charging for the same item.

So as with most things, some wheels a cheap and it shows, some cost more but are better and some cost more but are no better.  Just as I thought.

I remember buying a set of 18" Mazdaspeed wheels for my RX8 (Made by 'Rays' and rare as rocking horse poo) which were supposed to be £695 EACH.

 

You could buy a set look-a-likes or replicas for the price of one wheel at the time and although I appreciate the legit ones were much lighter, forged from a single billet and all the rest of it, someone was clearly making a huge mark up.

I had 2 piece BBS RK's on our old Saab, the original price was about 600 pounds each, but of course I bought them used for about 200 pounds for the set