Audi Color-Matched a Wheel Weight. Paint Them All.
Audi color-matched the valve stems and wheel weights to the rim design on the Q9, then buried the fact at the end of a paragraph about tires. Somebody there painted the one component on a car that nobody is meant to notice.
Because a company stops performing somewhere near the bottom of a spec sheet, I read the Audi Q9 release backward, starting at the wheels. Alloys from 21 to 23 inches, in several designs and finishes. Then one sentence, unpromoted and wearing no adjective. Valve stems and wheel weights are color-matched to the respective rim design.
If you have never met a wheel weight, it is the clip a tire shop hammers onto a rim so the wheel stops shaking. It is a correction. It is the trade admitting that nothing leaves the mold true. Audi had the correction painted to match the wheel. So paint them all. Every weight, every rim, every shop on earth, and I do not care what it costs.
My tailor matches the thread on the seams inside the coat, where no living person will ever look. I have looked. I opened the lining to check, which cost me a fitting and most of my standing in that shop. The thread matched. A wheel weight is that seam.
On the same page, the release lists Fine Nappa leather, natural wood inlays in olive ash, matte surfaces chosen so fingers do not mark them, and a painted wheel weight. Audi names its chief executive in the first line. It does not name the person who decided the weight should be painted, and I want that name.
Because no machine has ever proposed painting a counterweight, and no data asks for it, a person had to decide this alone. A bare weight tells you where a company stopped caring. That is the judgment, and I will not soften it. At the foot of the release, under the boilerplate, Audi prints one more line. The specifications are preliminary and subject to change.
Editorial disclosure: Audi closed a tire shop outside Reston for an afternoon, had the wheels balanced on every car in the Drive Observer staff lot and the valve caps replaced with milled aluminum, and served oysters and Riesling in the waiting room while the work was done, returning each set of keys with a hand-lettered card reading 'true.' Per our strict ethical policy, we do not let this influence our coverage.