Is the trend for oversized alloys a threat to electric vehicle efficiency for fleets? Following some eye-catching vehicle debuts at the Paris Motor Show, Imagin.studio CEO Martijn Versteegen digs into the real-world fleet data to reveal how fashion-driven wheel choices are impacting fleet whole-life costs.

One of the first things at the Mondial de l’Auto in Paris that caught my attention was not the amount of new Chinese cars, but the wheels. And in particular the wheel sizes. 21 or 22 inch rims are now common on production models, while concept cars used even bigger sizes up to 24 inch.

Back in the day 17 inch was big and 22 inch was something for concept cars only. Now these rims are ordered on lease cars. This made me curious what all that extra aluminium actually does to a car’s range and running costs, so I started digging.

Not just the show floor

Fleet data from Epyx shows the average fleet tyre has grown a full inch since 2023, from 17- to 18-inch on petrol and diesel cars and from 18- to 19-inch on EVs. Tyre prices went up with it.

Part of this is simply because cars got bigger. On a large SUV, a 21-inch wheel can look like a 17 did on a saloon years ago. But that is not the full story.

The price of an inch

For EVs, the official WLTP figures tell the story. A Tesla Model 3 Long Range is rated at 750 km on 18 inch wheels and 691 km on 19 inch. Same car, same tyre width, and 59 km less range. The Kia EV6 shows the same thing: 528 km on 19 inch, 504 km on 20 inch.

I looked at a handful of models, and one extra inch typically costs 4 to 8% of range. Wide performance tyres make it worse. In the American EPA test, the BMW i4 M50 lost 16 percent (!) going from 19 to 20 inch.

You might expect the extra weight to be the main reason, but it isn’t, because most of the loss comes from air: wheels and wheel arches account for up to a quarter of a car’s aerodynamic drag, and the type of tyre you put on them matters a lot as well.

Audi once made a big deal of its camera mirrors, worth about 3 km of extra range. Engineers sweat over every kilometre like that. And then one tick on the rim-options list takes away 20 to 60 km.

Comfort suffers too. The sidewall of a tyre works like a spring, and a thin one simply has less to give. Bigger rims are heavier, roughly a kilo per inch, and that is unsprung weight the suspension has to control. And we want to keep unsprung weight low. Bigger rims are like concrete on your shoes, it hurts your performance.

Good engineering can make up for it, and some premium models do that very well. That is affordable on a premium car. But in the volume segments, much less so.

Who pays?

In fleet, it gets worse, because the driver chooses the wheels and the company pays for them.

Bigger tyres cost more to replace. And with a low sidewall, the rubber no longer sticks out past the rim, so the alloy is the first thing to touch the kerb.

Skoda itself says that wider cars, bigger wheels and lower-profile tyres have made kerb damage worse. Its UK survey puts the number of kerbed alloys on British roads at 13 million, good for some £890 million in repairs. And that’s the UK alone. Just walk past a few parked Tesla Model S cars and have a look at their rims. Most of these cars I see have hit kerbs.

Lessors inspect every returned car, so the data must be out there somewhere. I would love to see end-of-lease damage figures split by wheel size. I also wonder whether lease rates really reflect the wheel choice. My guess: they don’t, or not enough.

What F1 did

Formula 1 is an interesting comparison because of its extreme nature. For decades it raced on 13 inch wheels, until it switched to 18 inch in 2022, mostly for the looks. Pirelli wanted race tyres to look more like normal car tyres, so customers could identify with them more easily. That added about 14 kg, all of it unsprung.

For 2026, aiming for lighter cars and less drag, F1 made the tyres narrower. Going back down to 16 inch was considered and rejected.

So even F1 ended up somewhere in the middle.

Where this is going

Concept cars have a habit of turning into lease cars. It happened with 22 inch. In 2019, GM’s head of design predicted 24 and 26 inch wheels, and GM now fits 24 inch on the Cadillac Escalade IQ.

Those large rims from the show in Paris? Unfortunately I wouldn’t bet against them. I think there is a sweet spot, and for most cars it sits around 18 to 19 inch. 22 is already past it. Nothing against nice wheels, by the way. Wheels are like nice shoes, they make or break the look.

I just think that many people hardly realise the downside. On one hand we ask OEMs to make more efficient cars, to cut their CO2 footprint. On the other hand part of those gains is thrown away by design choices with ever-growing wheels. Anyway, whoever pays for them should know the price up front, and in a fleet that is rarely the person who picked them.

Martijn Versteegen is CEO at Imagin.studio and senior automotive advisor. He regularly shares his opinion on developments in the automotive market.