on your car’s wheels.
Apparently, we’re all doing it.
It’s a billion dollar business.
(Well, that might be an exaggeration. The truth is I don’t know the actual figures for the profit in the hubcap industry, but I’m betting—given the number of cars on the road and the fact that most of them have at least four tires—that it is a significant sector of the economy.)
You may remember, a few weeks ago, a post wherein I was wishing for the Star Trek computer to record a moment by moment account of my life so that I could find the source of used hubcaps we bought some years ago.
Well, along the way to getting that replacement hubcap, I began to wonder why we have hubcaps at all.
I now refer you to Car Talk wherein a valiant attempt is made to justify the existence of hubcaps, but it turns out to be mostly like that old story about the end of the ham.
There are plenty of versions of it floating around. In essence, it goes something like this:
A new husband asked his bride why she was cutting the end off the ham prior to cooking it.
She replied that she didn’t know. Her mother had always done it that way, so she assumed it was the right thing to do.
Mom, when asked, replied the same. Her mother had always done it, so she had carried on discarding a portion of the ham prior to cooking.
Grandma was approached.
Yes, she confirmed. She had always cut off the end of the ham.
Why?
Because, otherwise, it didn’t fit in her pan.
This, of course, is a cautionary tale about doing things just because they’ve always been done that way.
And, it turns out, that the raison d’être of the hubcap is similar.
Hand-tightened wheel nuts might, if they fell off, clang around in a metal hubcap and alert you to a problem before you lost the actual wheel. (Many hubcaps today are plastic, so good luck with that. Plus, most wheel nuts are machine-tightened these days. Good luck with changing that flat yourself, too.)
Hubcaps might help prevent the nuts from rusting to a point where they are too difficult to remove (assuming you’re going to be able to loosen those machine-tightened things anyway). The Car Talk boys point out, however, that wheel rotation and brake inspection generally take care of that in a well-maintained vehicle.
That leaves them with the slippery slope argument. The ‘for want of a nail’ sort of thing. Missing hubcaps are the first step on a downward spiral where you don’t get the brakes inspected or change the oil.
Generally, however, it sounds like the end of the ham to me.
I wonder on what other things we are spending time and money for some ancient and now irrelevant tradition. I believe I’ll try to be re-thinking things as I go along. Sort of wondering on more than Wednesdays, so to speak.
