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Wheel Cover

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Every tire and wheel needs a Wheel Cover to cover the central part of the tire. Wheel covers can come in all kinds of different shapes and sizes. Wheel Covers can also be referred to as Hub Caps or Wheel Trim.

Wheel Covers can be made from many different materials, and they style and color is really up to you. Because there are so many options to choose from your best bet may be taking your vehicle down to the place where Wheel Covers are sold, and seeing firsthand what will look the best.

Early hubcaps were very small, sometimes merely covering the greased wheel bearing. These snap onto bulges on the wheel, and to change the wheel they are pried off with a tool resembling a very large slotted-tip screwdriver.

This differs from the spinners that serve the same purpose for racing cars and those cars with wire wheels, which were designed to be quickly unthreaded by hand. Most hubcaps were once made of chrome-plated steel or stainless steel.

Cars with stamped steel wheels often use a full wheel cover that conceals the entire wheel. Cars with alloy wheels or styled steel wheels generally use smaller hubcaps, sometimes called center caps, or none at all and rely instead on wheel locks.

A wheel cover is also an accessory covering an external rear-mounted spare tire (also known as a spare tire cover) found on some 4x4 vehicles.

Often a hubcap will bear the trademark or symbol of the maker of the automobile or the maker of the hubcap. Early hubcaps were often chrome plated, and many had decorative, non-functional spokes. Hubcaps were immortalized in the Art Deco styling of the spire of the Chrysler Building in midtown Manhattan.

When pressed steel wheels became common by the 1940s, these were often painted the same color as the car body. Hubcaps expanded in size to cover the lug nuts that were used to mount these steel wheels.

The next development was, as an option on more expensive cars, a chrome-plated trim ring that clipped onto the outer rim of the wheel, in addition to the center hubcap. Finally came the full wheel cover, which of course covered the entire wheel.

 By this time, specialty wheels of magnesium or aluminum alloy had come on the market, and wheel covers were a cheap means of imitating the styling of those. Plastic wheel covers appeared in the 1970s and became mainstream in the 1980s.

Plastic has largely replaced steel as the primary material for manufacturing hubcaps/trims, and where steel wheels are still used, the wheels are now generally painted black so the wheel is less visible through cutouts in the wheel trim.

On modern automobiles, full-wheel hubcaps are most commonly seen on budget models and base trim levels, while upscale and performance-oriented models have alloy wheels. Modern aluminum alloy wheels generally use small removable center caps, similar in size to the earliest hubcaps.