In my experience on a heavily loaded Syncro Camper, stock Audi Turbo
alloy wheels are quite strong. I found them much more durable than the
stock Vanagon alloys. The Vanagon alloys chip, crack, dent, and bend so
badly that they drag on the brake calipers. My Audi alloys suffered no
such damage ever even though they were driven on the same roads and with
even heavier loads. The Audis saw thousands of potholes each, tens of
thousands of miles of bad Mexican roads with no damage. The VW alloys
they replaced failed often. I even moved the VW alloys to a lighter
passenger Vanagon that friends drove along on some of my Baja trips but
they continued to suffered damage even then to my disgust.

I gave away the remains of my last set of trashed Vanagon 14" alloys as
I considered them all but useless for hard-core Baja excursions. Driven
slowly (some might say normally) they are fine.

I never had a problem with stock steel rims though, just the VW 14"
alloys. I switched to the 14" alloys because they are a little wider and
within the tire company specs for width in oversize 14" tires while the
steels were not. 27x8.5x14 load C tires properly inflated. The tires
were not ruined, just the rims.

Mark

David Brodbeck wrote:
>
>
> I don't buy it.  Steel wheels are tremendously strong and I've never seen
> one fail, on any vehicle...by contrast, alloy wheels get bent by potholes
> here all the time, and there are stories of pieces of the rim exploding
> off while tire shop personnel tried to mount tires on them.  At at least
> one shop they use a thick plywood shield while putting tires on alloy
> rims, for that reason -- over-pressure can easily result in rim failure.
>
> Check out the aftermarket rims in the local tire shop, some time...almost
> all of them will have a maximum pressure rating stamped inside and it's
> almost always surprisingly low.
>
>