Tonia

Okay, my dealer went down to $1653.80 for the 19" sparkle wheels installed. I'm thinking seriously about getting them, but there is also the cost of the tires. They quoted me $1363. I'm curious what others dealers are charging. If you are will to share what you paid, I'd appreciate it if you could break it down into the cost for the wheels and the cost for the tires separately. Thanks!!

Philbert

I'm assume, but am not positive, that the dealer is not providing you any trade-in credit for the 18" wheels? If that's the case, here's what I would do. Since it says that you live in Atlanta, you have Discount Tire locations near you. I would just buy the car with the stock wheels (or do you already have the RDX?), and order the Silver Sparkle wheels from Curry Acura (or see if your dealer will match their price). They list them on their website for $1,345.
Curry Acura Parts

Then take the wheels to Discount Tire. The website shows they have, for example, the Continental Conti Sport Contact 2 for $279/tire in 245/45 19. But Tire Rack sells them for $248. My experience with Discount Tire is that they will match any price. And they mount/balance for a reasonable fee ($10/tire I think?) Another benefit of Discount Tire, they repair flats and do tire rotations for free, for the life of the tires.

All in, with shipping, mount/balance, you should be saving over $500 off the dealer quotes you provided. And you could go with a cheaper tire, such as the $209 Pirelli PZero Rosso.

Did the dealer say what tires they were providing for $1,363, or $340/tire?

You can then mount winter tires on the stock wheels, (having put summer tires on the 19s) or sell them on ebay.

Cheers,
Phil

schuchmn

One suggestion would be to order a set of wheels and tiires from Tire Rack. You can choose from a lot of wheel styles and you'll save a bundle of money. Then you can use your stock 18" wheels for winter tires (assuming you live somewhere that actually gets snow).

Taking a quick look at Tire rack, I put together a package of 19x8.5" ASA AR1 wheels with Yokohama 245/50 19" tires for $1612 plus shipping. The only catch is that you need TPMS sensors which Tire Rack says they can't supply. But Tire Rack has a list if local installers that could, presumably, order the sensors and mount and balance the wheels. Or, if you no longer need the 18" wheels, you can get the sensors from them.

The other choice would be to go to a well-stocked tire store. They won't have the selection that Tire Rack has and the price would be higher, but then you're dealing with a local business that you might trust more. Even at that, I doubt a set of wheels with tires would cost anyehere near as much as Acura over-charges for the 19" set-up.

Almost three grand for a set of wheels strikes me as ridiculous.

Tonia

Actually, they will provide a trade-in credit of $600. I've been tracking some sales of the 18" on ebay motors and they seem to be doing about the same or a few hundred dollars better. I don't think I want to pay ebay charges and deal with trying to ship them or arrange pick up for $200-$300 more. Plus, I don't have a need for winter tires here. We get a light snow maybe 1-2 days a year and it pretty much shuts everything down so the car would be garaged on those days.

Car is due in next week which is why I need to make the decision soon. I was able to get the dealer to match the Curry price for the wheels. The difference is what the service department is charging for install. This is about $340 less than his original quote.

Michelins. Don't have the specifics with me.

Thanks for your suggestions.

Tonia

THat's the thing. I don't need winter tires and I don't really have the time or the inclination to try and sell them. What I want to do is try to negotiate the dealer down on the tire price by providing some comparisons.

The prices strikes me as ridiculous too especially considering its more than the value of the car that I'm considering trading in

sasair

with that in mind I'd go to discount tire in atlanta, pick out a nicer set of wheels and tires, take the pressure sensors from your stock wheels and put them in the new ones. without the trade-in value of the stock wheels and tires, you may end up paying the same amount or less depending on what you choose, but you'd also have a unique set of wheels on your RDX which I think would be more attractive.

Philbert

So the dealer is charging over $300 to "install" the wheels, which amounts to hitting 20 lugnuts with an air tool, twice...

I suppose tire mount/balance is part of that too, but as I mentioned, Discount Tire does that for I think $10, but in no case more than $20/tire.

Still, if you take the $600 credit for the stock wheels/tires, and value the time/effort savings of not selling them on your own, it could be an ok deal.

In that case, you could order tires from TireRack, and have them shipped directly to your dealer for mounting on the new wheels. That's an option if they won't match TireRack's price.

Cheers,
Phil

Tonia

Phil - Yes, that includes the mount/balance. Also, something about recalculating the odomoter for the new tire size, which my husband says they will have to do, but it couldn't take that long . I know its more than I'd pay somewhere else. I'm just working to get it as low as I can. I had thought about picking them up from some place else and taking the tires to the dealer to mount on the new wheels, but I wasn't really sure if that was a realistic option. I can just foresee that being against "policy". Thanks for suggesting it. If I can't get them to come down, then I'll look into it.

I appreciate everyone elses suggestions, but I've looked around and decided to go with the Acura wheels so while I appreciate all the suggestions to get the wheels/tires somewhere else for less what I'm really looking for is to find out what others paid their dealer for the tires.

jhwu

"Also, something about recalculating the odomoter for the new tire size, which my husband says they will have to do, but it couldn't take that long "

Why would they have to recalculate the odometer for the new tire size? Unless the overall diameter has changed significantly (which I doubt as these are Acura's own +1 wheels and tire combo), the odometer should not be affected. Even if it's ever so slightly off, nothing should need to be adjusted.... hmmm...

Jim

Philbert

yeah, going from a 235/55 18 to a 245/45 19 should only change the diameter by 1/2"... which translates to about 1.8%, or about 1mph off at 60mph. not sure how they can adjust for that.

Tonia

I kind of tuned out at that point because it sounded like to me. Actually it sounded like the crap I tell people at work to justify my fees My husband seems to think it was legit although he'd pay list for everything if he had his way -just to avoid the hassle and to get me to stop obsessing over every $ .

sasair

If there is a change, any change, in diameter, they should recalibrate the speedometer/odometer especially if they are charging you that much. Maybe not a big deal or off by much, but off none-the-less. I'm not sure about the 1.8% figure, but that would also equate to 900 miles every 50k miles on the odometer.....

Tonia

So, I was wrong on the tires. They aren't Michelins. The 19" tires are Dunlop SP Sport 01A - which Tire Rack has for $335 each so $1340 for four.

sasair - I imagine they will recalibrate - actually this could be important to me because I keep my cars a long time and over 7+ years it could be a significant difference.
I just can't imagine it will take more than 3 hours for the whole deal so while I'm okay with the ~$300 to install - the original amount of about $500+ kind of got us off on the wrong foot. I'm working on the basis that in my opinion the labor shouldn't exceed $100/hour.

jhwu

Tonia, the tire prices sound competitive. Maybe one of you should keep an eye on the tech doing the wheel swap... I still really doubt that they will recalibrate anything especially on a factory wheel upgrade.

Most speedometer are off by 1-3mph anyways when you are at 60mph. The difference obviously gets even higher the higher speed you drive, so I really doubt they would do anything nor would Acura require them to recalibrate anything. Maybe I'm wrong and if so, kudos to Honda for even thinking about this minute difference in diameter size, but this is the first time I've ever heard of this before on a factory wheel upgrade.

Jim

sasair

Well if they are telling you they are doing it, and they are charging you to do it, they better damn well do it. If they do recalibrate the speed/odo, they should give you the report from the calibration. If not you should ask them for it.

Tonia

The calibration is not a huge deal to me. Yes, over years it could be 1000-2000 mile difference so it matters to me some but on the other hand by the time it made a significant difference the car would have so many miles that 1000-2000 wouldn't make much to any difference in the value. I just thought it was interesting when I mentioned his prices was X dollars over online prices and that X seemed high for installation that in his "reasoning" for their price was that the installion also included time for the recalibration. He didn't make a huge deal out of it either, but it wasn't something that had every occurred to me before.