But if you paid for chromoly lugs with a quality coating and they start coroding then you'd probably be upset that they were just plain steel. Whether these are quality or not has yet to be seen but by then it'll be too late. The safe play is to get his money back

But that also brings up something even more relevant: lug nuts have no QC or testing standard like wheels.

You can advertise what tonnage press you used to forge metal with. You can advertise what grade metal you use. But there's no magical testing standard of lug nuts.

Brand is no assurance of quality... see below


My authentic, straight-from-the-source Kics R40 Iconix lug nuts are rusting at the ends. I should take a picture later... but for me, they work perfectly fine.

-alex

Mine are not yet rusting(I have R40s as well) but I've had cheap auto parts store lugs on other cars that flaked after taking them off once. They may be functional but will look bad. And while there may be no QC standard across all lugs, I expect the expensive babe brand ones to be held to a higher tolerance, have higher quality coating, be a better material, and have their various tolerances and whatnot checked more often and more completely than cheap lugs. I don't have a problem with reps so long as they don't pretend to be real. Rotas look like Volks but they don't have a Volk sticker. I've had straight knockoff parts before(logo and everything) and they failed pretty quickly. I'm confident the"real"ones wouldn't have. While lugs may not fly off the car because they are low quality does not make them equally good. Besides he paid for the"real"thing. It doesn't matter how well these will work

Eh, just because there's no accepted standard to measure lug nuts against, doesn't mean that companies dont perform quality control on their products. Quality control is a normal part of a manufacturing process. At the end of the process, someone checks either all the pieces of a sampling of a batch to make sure it fits whatever guidelines set by the customer.

^ This. I thought I was paying for the real thing, so I want the real thing. If I was OK with replicas, I would STILL return these and just buy cheapo replicas myself at the replica price.

Anyway, PayPal just closed the claim in my favor, so I will be shipping these back for my refund and purchasing some authentics instead.

I would not trust replica lug nuts. I've seen my share of authentic ones failing. Some of the replica's I've seen have failed or broken horrendously.