I work in a Honda dealership, so adding accessories to cars is sometimes a job I do. Recently I ended in a rather confusing situation involving 2 cars, 8 tires, 16 wheels, 12 wheel locks, and 56 lug nuts.

The way this all started was the dealership got an Accord Touring to put a bunch of accessories on for display in the showroom. It was a white car and most of the accessories added black or black chrome accents to the car.

One of the things added was black wheels. I’m a big fan of black wheels a lot of the time, and they really made the car look good. I had to take the tires off the original wheels, and there were also accessory black lug nuts and wheel locks to put on.

After several weeks in the showroom the car was sold, but the customer didn’t want the black wheels. Instead, they wanted the black chrome wheels that were also available. This is where things get complicated.

The dealership didn’t want to risk scratching up the black wheels, so they had me take the tires off of another Accord to put on the black chrome wheels that were going on the first car. The black wheels that were on that car would then get put on the second car.

The customer buying the first car wanted the original chrome lug nuts to go with the black chrome wheels, so I had to get those out of storage where they were being kept with the original wheels. The second car came with it’s own black lug nuts, which are a different design than the accessory ones, so I kept those on that car. The accessory black lug nuts got put in storage with the original wheels.

Then there was the issue of wheel locks. Every car on our lot with alloy wheels gets wheel locks during the time it’s in inventory, and the customer has the option to buy them with the car. When I first put the black wheels on the first car, I also put black wheels locks on and gave the chrome wheel locks back to the lot guys. Because I had put the accessory black wheel locks on the first car, I needed regular chrome ones to go back on it with the chrome lug nuts. The second car, despite having black lug nuts on it already, had chrome wheel locks on it, so I swapped those with the black ones from the first car.

After all everything was finished, Car A had Wheels D with Tires B, lug nuts A, and wheel locks C, and Car B had Wheels B, Tires A, lug nuts C, and wheel locks B. I drew a diagram to try to explain this. Probably doesn’t really help, but it shows how confusing this was. Hopefully this is the last switch with all these wheels and tires and lug nuts.

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-Dan