“I guess I’m going to the part store now.”
A man who got the tires changed on his Lexus GS350 had a gut-wrenching realization after bringing his car into the shop.
Cole (@rollincole_7) uploaded a video on social media explaining that the wheels on his tires were outfitted with a widely used anti-theft mechanism: wheel locks. But there was one problem.
“Tell me if I’m crazy here: I just got new tires two weeks ago. As soon as I drop my car off, they call me, and they say, ‘Hey, you have wheel locks. Do you know where that socket’s at?’ And I then realized I threw that away when I did my brakes, probably, on accident,” he revealed to his viewers.
But as it turns out, the concern of the tire shop employees wasn’t rooted in being able to swap his tires. Rather, they wanted to know if Cole was fine with getting those wheel locks tossed out, as they informed him that they could knock the wheel locks off without much issue.
“So, they said, ‘Hey, if you don’t care about not having that on your car anymore, it’s fine. We’ll get those off anyways, put the tires on. It’s not gonna be a problem,’” he says they remarked.
The Lexus driver gave the OK for the techs to remove the tires. As his video progressed, he exited his vehicle to show off the status of his wheels following the tire change. And from the first glance, it’s evident that the folks who changed out his tires made a huge error.
“’Sure, just go ahead and do it.’ So, it’s been a few weeks since then. I have been driving around with one missing on each wheel,” Cole says. He aims his camera lens at two of his rims, and indeed, there’s a lug nut missing on each of them. Presumably, the same divots where the locked lug nuts were installed.
“I know technically you can do that, but I think it’s kind of crazy that they didn’t at least tell me. So, I guess I’m going to go to the part store now to go find some,” he says at the end of the video.
Standard wheels/rims are almost always secured to a car’s wheel hub with five separate lug nuts. Wheel locks typically feature one specialized lug nut that requires a dedicated socket/key that is used to remove that final lug nut. These are meant to slow down criminals who are looking to quickly jack a car up and steal its rims, which can fetch high resale prices. In Cole’s case, it appears that whoever replaced his tires neglected to replace the wheel-lock lugnut they presumably destroyed to perform the tire change, as this DIY-er demonstrates.
Surprisingly, Cole was able to drive his GS350 without incident, but does that mean rolling around with a missing lugnut is a good idea?
According to auto parts manufacturer Orion, you definitely could. Whether or not you should is an entirely different question. As a blog post from the business states, “There is a difference between what’s technically possible and what’s actually advisable for protecting your safety, your vehicle, and everyone else on the road … it is usually possible to drive with 4 lug nuts instead of 5, at least temporarily.”
Orion went on to state that “modern vehicles are designed with a margin of safety.” This means that cars should be stable enough to travel with only 4 lug nuts securing a wheel to its respective wheel hub, especially if the nuts are “properly torqued.”
However, this isn’t advisable for commuting long-term, and this is because “the lug nuts all play an important role. Each lug nut helps distribute the load evenly across the wheel hub. When one is missing, that balance is disrupted,” Orion explains.
Ultimately, a car with missing lug nuts won’t drive the way it was designed to, and any rotational/operational inconsistencies will only exacerbate with time. This means that if you realize your car’s missing a lug nut, you should probably get a replacement for it as soon as possible, as Cole averred he would in his post.
Others experienced the same issue Cole did upon getting new tires, like this one Reddit user’s daughter who had wheel locks but also misplaced the key for them. This prompted shop techs to “cut off the keyed lug nut,” and in lieu of getting her new lug nuts, they sent her on her merry way with four, not five.
There have been other car owners who’ve been on the receiving end of neglect when it came to tire swaps. This driver was able to unscrew the lug nuts on her car by hand after getting her ride back from the shop, which indicates that whoever affixed them to the car forgot a key detail: torquing them properly. Thankfully, because she checked her ride, she avoided a potentially calamitous road incident.
This CarTalk blog post also discusses this very phenomenon in a response to a reader who was baffled as to why she was missing so many lug nuts from her wheels. The author rejected the idea that this was a phenomenon that occurred due to regular road use. Alternately, they expressed that errors during tire installation were more than likely the source of her wheel woes.
“It’s very likely they [the tire shop] are responsible. Someone forgot to tighten your lug nuts or didn’t tighten them enough. And that’s exactly what will happen,” Car Talk replied.
Motor1 has reached out to Cole via email for further comment. We will update this story if he responds.
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