Originally Answered: Can I drive without a hub cap? Yes, you can drive a car without a hub cap, which is used to cover those lug nuts for cosmetic purpose only. You can remove all of them if you don’t want to have them on your vehicles.

jacking each wheel up one at a time and remove hubcaps. Or Next time you get the car serviced ask them to swap them over for you. Some of these only hold on with three lug nuts out of five, and could theoretically be removed without jacking the vehicle up by only removing the three lug nuts holding them on.

How to Keep a Hubcap From Falling Off

1. Make sure that the clips holding your hubcap on are positioned correctly on the wheel.
2. Clean any lubrication off the wheel around the area where the hubcap fits.
3. Wrap clip-on retainers three or four times around with plastic electrical tape.

If they are properly mounted or installed, and in good condition they HARDLY EVER fall off. It’s just about UNHEARD of. BUT there’s one exception. If you turn corners really hard and fast, wheel covers may pop off.

Design Flaws – Some hubcaps are just destined to fall off of your car. In most cases, it is simply a bad manufacturer design and a lack of support to the clips that hold the hubcap onto the wheel. No matter what the reason, there is not much you can do about it, except to change to a different style of hub cap.

By the 1980’s, ABS plastic wheel covers virtually replaced the use of steel hubcaps by auto manufacturers.

Hubcaps don’t look as good or as attractive alloy wheels plain and simple. Even the best hubcaps end up looking cheap. They’re tacked on after the fact. They’re like wearing fake glasses.

Beware Of Imitation Hubcaps There’s a reason we don’t, too: OEM hubcaps use a much higher grade plastic than imitation or knockoff products like you’ll find in the big box stores. Apart from the fact that those hubcaps always just look cheap and poorly made, they are far from durable.

People with the crappies car on earth take their hubcaps off to fit in to the racing look or something. This has pissed me off so much that I’m considering becoming a bizarro thief. That’s right. I work at a car rental place and for some reason we have piles of hubcaps lying around.

Sure, the car will still go just like it always has. But driving around sans hubcaps makes your car–and you, by extension–look sloppy. But wheel covers, or the lack of them, can make or break a car’s appeal.

As long as these wheel-caps have uniform weights, they won’t affect the wheels’ balance. All good quality wheel-caps generally have this feature. But poor-quality wheel-caps lack in this quality and they do affect the wheel balance which is dangerous.

loose hubcaps makes noise, not vibration.

As stated above, the hubcap effectively covers the center portion of the wheel, including the lug nuts and bolt assembly. In the case of comparing a hubcap with either an aftermarket or OE wheel, a hubcap is an attachment to the wheel and rim assembly itself.

These patented wheel center caps retains their correct orientation when the vehicle is stationary or moving at slow speed. The center caps automatically latches on the wheel to spin at the same speed when the vehicle moves at a higher speed.