Next Tuning Fad? Russians Build Transparent Wheels Using Plexiglas

The tuning scene is vast, creative, and limitless. As they say, your imagination is your limit when redesigning, tuning, and turning your car into a personal masterpiece. Some even take years to make their dream build, which shows the resilience and creativity behind every tuner and aftermarket geniuses.

However, our favorite Russians from Youtube's Garage 54 created something that's way beyond ordinary and frankly, absurd. If the name sounds familiar to you, these are the same guys who experimented on an old Toyota RAV4 and put it on reverse while running at speeds. This experiment isn't that destructive – well, at least for now.

The folks at Garage 54 decided to make a set of transparent wheels using plexiglass. For the uninitiated, plexiglass is poly(methyl methacrylate) – a transparent thermoplastic that's used as a shatter-resistant replacement for glass. It's not an actual glass per se, but its characteristics make it technically classified as a type of glass.

Going back to the experiment, what these folks did is to get a three-piece wheel with bolt-on spokes and replaced it with plexiglass. They custom-ordered the material from their source after careful measurements, which by the way failed by a bit. Of note, they used 20mm-thick plexiglass in this experiment.

After some adjustments to the clear spokes, the guys were able to bolt them on to the rim and eventually bolted them on to the axle. To be fair, the resulting product actually looks good on the black Mercedes 190E, which makes us think if this is really possible for daily drivers?

Unfortunately, Garage 54 wasn't able to road test the new clear-spoked rims (because they messed up the measurement and hindered the car's steering). Do you think a plexiglass set of wheels could last? For how long? Let us know in the comments section below.