Originally Posted by Bigjsn250

Totally agree. The wheels they designed for the car should handle pot holes, expansion joints etc. I have hit pot holes so big in Memphis that it bubbled the tire so bad I was lucky to get home. Tire was destroyed, wheel was just fine. Anyone that say's you should't be surprised if you crack a wheel hitting a bridge expansion joint, well, that's just ridiculous.

Originally Posted by Road machine

I guess your problem is in reading comprehension. I never called anyone a liar, unless they are claiming that they never hit anything but their wheels bent. That would suggest that as the car is rolling along on a perfect flat smooth road the wheels suddenly and all by itself bends somewhere. That is what is impossible. Now if people say hey I just hit the usual bumps and expansion joints that do no damage to my other cars, then you would be admitting that you are hitting things, just things you don't consider to be road hazards. The problem is that what is a road hazard to one vehicle may not be to another and visa versa. A vehicle that has a very high profile tire has that for a reason, and that reason is to absorb bumps and give a more comfortable ride. But as in all engineering every thing related to engineering is a compromise. What makes a tire absorb bumps also allows the wheel to deform in hard cornering, thus making handling squishier as well. When the Corvette (or any other high performance car) owner demands better handling and higher cornering speeds the engineers make a compromise in another direction, making the wheel profile much lower, thus eliminating, to the greatest extent possible, the side deformation during cornering, but the compromise is that you get almost no absorption of bumps, and the ride is harsher. This is the compromise that most sports cars make, and another of the draw backs to this is that the same absorption that makes the ride smoother also protects the wheel against bending.
Now what you are saying is that GM used sub par wheel suppliers, and that is what is causing the bending. Now that would indeed be truly stupid of GM as that would be pissing off their customer without going back to the manufacturer for a wheel that is not within their specifications. As a manufacturer I know something about contracting for major companies like GM and Boeing and companies like that. They have all sorts of traceability requirements as well as testing requirements. I am sure that GM would require a certain aluminum alloy, that that alloy be heat treated to a certain spec. And that the wheel pass a quality control inspection with traceable data that they can point to in case of any failures. If the wheels were failing, they would know exactly what batch was failing, who made that batch and they would demand replacement which would be passed on to people who bent their wheels. So they have control over manufacturing, what they don't have control over is the nut behind the wheel. I see all sorts of stupidity from Corvette owners ( I also see it from Mustang and every other manufacturer owners) I have seen guys get into their corvettes that have been sitting all day, (so obviously cold), start up the car and do a smoking burnout and bouncing off the rev limiter. Is that smart in your book???? You would probably say sure....and you would be wrong. Those are the guys who complained about the valve issues on the LS7. I never had that issue because I never reved my engine above 3k until the oil was at temp. Now that didn't stop people from saying this was a bad GM vendor or a bad GM design even though 90% of the cars never had the issue. But it did have the affect of reducing the value of those cars, and it was due to the stupidity of those guys who think that you can do anything to a car the second you start it....just like the guys who think that a $90k car with very low profile tires should never bend a wheel, when they are hitting things like expansion joints and bumps that may not harm their SUV, but sure will do damage to their Corvette.

Now too bad you never learned any lessons from your dad....he sounds like a smart guy....obviously not someone who would accuse someone of calling others a liar when simple common sense tells you that what they are claiming is impossible. So get back to flipping your burgers, and I will get back to making high tech aerospace parts.

Originally Posted by rdgbuccaneer

I had 3 bent wheels on a Grandsport. Never in track mode, never on the track. At 5k picked up a vibration and was told of the bent wheels. This is my 3rd Corvette. Never had any wheel issues on any of my cars and at 65 I had a bunch. Using " Smart Driver "as a clutch … I got my wheels replaced. Now I don't drive the car!
This wheel thing has me quite pissed off! As a blue collar worker I worked a lot of hard overtime to buy that 84K car! I be damed if I going t spend 8K on wheels, I will trade the none drivable pice of **** on a RAM!
Just think....we now have a auto that lost value because of poor engineering....to drive it we need to invest 8K for non factory wheels or keep the wheels and get penalized because they are factory "JUNK" wheels.....what Bull ****!

Thanks GM for ruining the "Corvette" experience, you all deserved to be fired!

Originally Posted by NineVettes

Ah, now you are a an aerospace engineer and I am a fast food worker - right.... Please put down the crack pipe long enough to read all of the reports of ACTUAL INCIDENTS OF WHEEL FAILURE by a large number of forum owners of C7 Z's. And all these folks are either: (1) liars; (2) blind, or (3) just stupid, ignorant people who are deliberately abusing their cars. And none of them have your self professed superior knowledge of physics, engineering, and process control over low bidder, foreign sourced mass manufacturing processing.

OMG, you are just so knowledgeable. Yes, a beacon of light to all of us fools who have reported wheel problems - the control guy who can choose any car in his lane..

Arguing with a fool will only drag me down to your level, and you will beat with me experience.

So I will have no more discourse with you. Enjoy your self proclaimed superiority..

Originally Posted by Road machine

If you are also claiming you hit nothing and your wheels spontaneously bent then yes you are lying too.....and probably to yourself as well. Wheels don't just bend spontaneously. They bend when you hit something that causes them to bend. The other cars you own do not have nearly as wide a tire as the Z06, and that width adds to the possibility of bending wheels. Sorry you don't understand physics, and I would bet that in a year or so you will bend any forged wheel you buy as well, as many high end sports cars have forged wheels and bend them too. I have 2500 miles on my Z06 on horrible NJ roads and have not bent a wheel yet, but if I do you can count on one thing.....I will not cry and blame my mistake on GM....and demand that they warranty something that no other car maker warrantys....road hazard damage.

Originally Posted by Road machine

First of all if you hit nothing the wheels would not bend.....second of all the usual bumps and expansion joints are not nothing....they are what is bending your wheels. Pot holes are not even the worst thing you can hit since the tires on the corvette are so wide that they can roll right over pot holes that would swallow a narrower tire. The worst things to hit are raised expansion joints as they are a perfectly straight shot across the whole wheel. If one is high enough it will definitely bend or crack a wheel. I am glad to hear that your vision is good now look way down the road instead of at the bumper of the guy right in front of you.....you see those cars jumping up at that bridge expansion joint....slow down before you hit it. Now just to be clear I didn't called anyone a liar but qualified it by saying that if you claim you never hit anything and claim to have bent a wheel then you are a liar. You admit that you hit things so obviously you are not a liar....you just don't realize that what you are hitting is considered a road hazard to something like a Corvette Z06 or a Ferrari or Lambo. What happened or didn't happen in a different car at a different time does not change the fact that you are hitting something that bends your wheels. The sooner you understand what those things are or can be the sooner you will stop bending wheels. I am sorry if you take offense, but as I am sure a quite well known eye surgeon, such as yourself, must know the laws of physics are not suggestions they are fact and the fact is that if you hit something hard enough, it will go past elastic deformation and move into the area of plastic deformation. So I would suggest that rather than threaten people and getting angry you learn what might be bending your wheels so you can avoid hitting those things.

Originally Posted by Road machine

Well I am an engineer and I do make aerospace parts but I am not an aerospace engineer, I am a process and mechanical engineer. So I do know a thing or two about how wheels are made and about how aluminum alloys can be used and worked with. I have been reading the reports of failures for months and I am getting sick of them, because save one or two people who understand how these wheels work, the vast majority of people bitching here are looking to get GM to buy them new wheels for road hazard issues. Try that with Goodyear or any other tire manufacturer and see where that gets you. So looking at all the wheels over the months can you point out the pattern that shows the issue is with a particular "cheap" manufacturer. You know are they all the same style wheel.....the same color, the same size?? Take a look and then get back to me with how foolish you sounded in your last hissy fit.

Originally Posted by golfbone

And just to be clear as I can do a dumnbass who can't seem to understand things when stated clear as day......I already have road and tire insurance that has paid for every single repair so I don't need GM to pay for anything. What I need is a car I can trust and drive on normal roads as it was meant to be driven without having to pay the price of 3 more weeks in the shop. Tired of keeping a bicycle pump in the trunk. Will be fixing this problem myself by putting on the kind of high quality rims that should have come with the car in the first place. Want to place a bet that solves the problem? How much? i'll give you 2 to 1 odds. Dumbass.

Originally Posted by tertiumquid

Apparently, a lot of you just are convinced that potholes and road obstructions are always involved. They aren't, quite the opposite. To that point here's what happened to me. I took my '16 up into the North Georgia mountains with a lot of hard turns and switchbacks similar the Tail of the Dragon. Every thing was fine and I happened onto a Porsche and we had a spirited run together for 8 miles, taking the turns pretty close to the skid pad limit. It was great fun but it was just hard corning, no potholes, ridges or other road hazards. When I got back down onto level roads, I noticed a pronounced vibration and assumed I'd lost a wheel weight or two. So, off to Discount Tire and that's when the manager comes out of the shop and says " you'd better come and take a look at this on the balance machine". One front wheel was egg-shaped, and the two rears were running out by at least a half-inch. Needless to say, no amount of weights was going to fix this. I started looking over the inside beads and thought I saw a small crack. We cleaned the wheels and found several cracks on two of the same wheels. The only one that was ok in all respects was the driver's front.

You don't necessarily have to hit something to bend one of these wheels. In my case, the torsional stress of the turns was enough to do the bending but I have no idea how long the cracks had been there. The fact that the car ran smooth and true prior to the Porsche chase and shook badly after absolutely indicts the wheel quality and strength. After all, I had not even done what a normal track day would entail so I think it's well within bounds to say this is unacceptable drawback for a car of this capability and price.

A lot of you want to lay the wheels problem off to incompetent drivers who seem incapable of avoiding road hazards. You're wrong. All we're saying is that while providing one of the best deals for a high performance sports car on the planet, for God's sake, put some quality wheels on it.

Originally Posted by rdgbuccaneer

I had 3 bent wheels on a Grandsport. Never in track mode, never on the track. At 5k picked up a vibration and was told of the bent wheels. This is my 3rd Corvette. Never had any wheel issues on any of my cars and at 65 I had a bunch. Using " Smart Driver "as a clutch … I got my wheels replaced. Now I don't drive the car!
This wheel thing has me quite pissed off! As a blue collar worker I worked a lot of hard overtime to buy that 84K car! I be damed if I going t spend 8K on wheels, I will trade the none drivable pice of **** on a RAM!
Just think....we now have a auto that lost value because of poor engineering....to drive it we need to invest 8K for non factory wheels or keep the wheels and get penalized because they are factory "JUNK" wheels.....what Bull ****!

Thanks GM for ruining the "Corvette" experience, you all deserved to be fired!

Originally Posted by NineVettes

Thank you for your clear, well reasoned post which documented your experience with the well documented wheel issue and how you incurred your problems. It is a bit analogous to my wheel problems as a consequence of my two open day track sessions on a 1.8 mile, more technical track with lots of challenging corners. Only one fairly decent straight-away where I could hit about 130 mph before slowing down to take a very tight, right hand corner. Pulling some decent G's even at my rusty skill levels. I believe that this corner might be the primary place where my wheels started to fail. At both sessions, the vibrations became quite apparent before I was able to run the whole day, thus ending my session prematurely. At first I thought that it was possible that I had lost one of the stick on weights, but that later proved inaccurate. And for the second session I completely eliminated that possibility by putting duct tape over the weights. I had plans to step up to a session at Sebring next, but given that is definitely a rougher track, that will not happen to the new wheels are put on. In fact, as I mentioned earlier, driving the car at all with its nasty vibrations annoys me to the point it stays in the garage until it is gone.

Interestingly enough, one of the track day participants on the first day had a '19 Camaro ZL1 1 LE, and he told me it came stock from the factory with forged wheels. Isn't that interesting that the Camaro engineers specified forged wheels for its track version Camaro while our Z06's came only with cast wheels? And I had actually given some thought to buying the ZL1 1LE before deciding it just was not for me for a variety of reasons.

So, as always - facts matter..

Originally Posted by Pribilof

Wow this thread got heated quick.

First, new wheels will not void any single part of your car warranty. That's just silly.

Second, comparing the 20x12 C7Z wheels with 25 sidewall tires (run flats, no less) to your 1985 C4 with 16x9.5 wheels and 50 sidewall tires... Seriously? That's a TON more stress on the wheels in the C7, even in "normal" driving.

At least get some Forgestar or some other rotary forged wheels if you don't want to spend the money on Forgelines, HRE, Signature, Etc.

Originally Posted by Prime Target

Wow. This got ugly quick. I’m purchasing a C7Z this week. Ill be certainly be keeping an eye on the wheels.

Originally Posted by Prime Target

Wow. This got ugly quick. I’m purchasing a C7Z this week. Ill be certainly be keeping an eye on the wheels.

Originally Posted by golfbone

I've tried being polite. Now I'll be clear as I can be. I've hit NOTHING. I'e driven the car back and forth to work not on a glass surface but on normal roads that the car was intended to be driven on. No faster than 75, no pot holes, no train tracks.....nothing that should bend a rim and nothing that has in the past with 40 years of driving experience and cozens of cars (except for a 1995 M3 which bent rims when I took a hard look at them.....traded it in because I hated that problem). So if you cannot understand that this is a defective materials/design issue it would seem that you are just not bright enough to grasp this and I'll not waste more time trying to explain. I mean....you have to be quite the dumbass to think it's acceptable to spend 100k for a car that can't even commute to the office on nice well maintained Spring roads without getting 3 bent rims in less than 100 miles. I that's acceptable to you then perhaps you'd like to buy my rims when I pull them off my car and get Forgelines. I'll give you a really good deal on them and won't try to take too much advantage of you just because you are stupid..

Originally Posted by golfbone

And just to be clear as I can to a dumnbass who can't seem to understand things when stated clear as day......I already have road and tire insurance that has paid for every single repair so I don't need GM to pay for anything. What I need is a car I can trust and drive on normal roads as it was meant to be driven without having to pay the price of 3 more weeks in the shop. Tired of keeping a bicycle pump in the trunk. Will be fixing this problem myself by putting on the kind of high quality rims that should have come with the car in the first place. Want to place a bet that solves the problem? How much? i'll give you 2 to 1 odds. Dumbass.

Originally Posted by Prime Target

Wow. This got ugly quick. I’m purchasing a C7Z this week. Ill be certainly be keeping an eye on the wheels.