- This is the biggest pothole in Los Angeles
and these are the cheapest replica wheels
we could find.
Today we're gonna be finding out
if cheap knockoff car parts are as dangerous as people say.
Oh yeah.
Justin, if you're ready, hit it.
(car revs)
Oh God.
- [Nolan] Oh, sweet Jesus.
- [Crew] Oh! - [Zach] Oh!
Big thanks to vine for sponsoring today's video.
- [Nolan] Yep, think I find your problem.
- [Kids] Ew!
- Hey there, Donut Boys.
That engine looks stuffed to the rafters
with cheap motor oil.
- You got that right, Dr. John Ellis.
I keep telling the kid that cheap motor oil
can cause a lot of damage,
like excessive wear from foreign lubrication
or even seizing your engine from sludge like this.
- Okay, but where do you expect me to find a motor oil
with high quality lubrication
to reduce friction, plus prevent a sludgy buildup.
- Say no more, cheap oil man.
- Hey, don't call me cheap oil man.
(tools rattle and buzz)
Who is this guy?
Does he like live here?
- Oh, he's the founder of Valvoline,
you know, America's first motor oil.
He showed up one day randomly and.
- Behold! The all new Valvoline extended protection
full synthetic motor oil.
AKA our best oil ever.
It's got 50% better wear protection than industry standards.
And it's 10 times stronger against oil breakdown.
Valvoline's newest formula offers ultimate protection
designed to extend the life of your engine.
- What more do you expect
from the people who've been innovating
America's automotive history since the beginning.
- Do your engine a favor and use Valvoline,
the original motor oil.
To learn more, check out valvoline.com
or just click the leak below.
- Do you guys smell something burning?
- Oh no! My beef steaks!
- The first products we're gonna be looking at today
are steering wheels.
Now one of these steering wheels is a legit Nardi wheel
and one is a knockoff replica Nardi wheel.
Now they might look pretty dang identical,
but one of 'em cost 350 bucks.
And one of 'em costs 35.
And honestly, at a quick hard look,
I can tell which one's which.
But let's run around the office
and see if any of my coworkers can tell the difference.
Jimmy, 10 seconds, real or fake?
- Fake. (bell dings)
- All right, that was quick.
10 seconds real or fake, real or fake, real or fake?
- Real. (bell dings)
- All right, Joey, 10 seconds. Real or fake?
- This one's real. (buzzer buzzes)
- Real or fake, which one's which?
Don't look at each other.
- I'm not allowed to look at- - Huh-uh.
- Real. (bell dings)
- Can I switch with him? - [Zach] Times up.
So most of my coworkers were able to tell the difference
between the real versus fake steering wheel,
but looks aren't what we're here to test.
The biggest concern with fake products is safety.
The expensive Nardi steering wheel
comes from a reputable brand with quality standards.
The cheap one on the other hand is a mystery.
It's stamped made in Italy,
but I don't know if I believe that.
- This made in Italy is really funny.
It's like anyone can put made in.
- The last thing you want
is your steering wheel collapsing in a car crash.
Could cheaping out on a counterfeit steering wheel
put your life in danger?
To find out we installed it in our Cabrio
and we're gonna see what it takes
to bend each of these wheels.
We're starting out with the real Nardi wheel.
I'm gonna see if I have the guts to bend this thing.
I mean, you know, sometimes when you're driving,
you're like, you like to lean way back sometimes.
That's pretty strong,
but sometimes when you're driving,
you start leaning forward like this.
(Zach groans)
Hey Justin! - Yo.
- I need some muscles, man.
Help me out. (rock music)
Push! Push! Push!
(rock music continues)
Oh yeah!
Good Lord.
Is this a Tesla?
Dude, that's a sweet wheel.
Good Lord.
Scale of 1 to 10?
- Once I started pushing that bent very quickly.
- Well, maybe that's 'cause you're insanely strong.
- Ah!
- No, honestly, I'm surprised
you were able to break that that easy.
I was really pushing on that and to no effect.
But I would say it did take some effort.
Let's put the cheap wheel on
and see if it's any easier to break
or if we just find the same results.
Okay, now we've got our $35 knockoff Nardi wheel on the car
and I'm gonna see if it's any easier to bend or break.
The last one did break, but it didn't really bend.
Oh. (crew laughs)
Well, that's kinda cool.
It's like reverse corn, Jimmy.
Back to regular corn. (crew laughs)
Well, that seems a little bit worse.
- You didn't even need my help.
- I know. - Oh my God.
- Yeah, she's not really put together very well.
So it's pretty clear to me, pretty obvious,
that this knockoff wheel is not a chiller.
It's a straight up killer.
The next product we're gonna be testing is
these real Sparco gloves versus these fake ones.
- I want these gloves
and I'm pissed that we're gonna probably destroy them
for this video.
Just the feel of the real ones
is so much more comfortable than these fake ones.
- Yeah, and they feel thicker, just more protective.
- And that's because the real ones have
external stitching around the fingers and everything.
- Yeah, they almost look inside out.
Also it's worth noting that this is a medium.
Fits my hand pretty good.
This is a large and it's way too small.
- [Nolan] There's a tag that tells you what it's made of
but there's no safety tag.
- [Zach] Right. - Whereas on the Sparcos,
there's an FIA compliance,
but also an SFI tag as well for the US safety compliance.
Fun fact, SFI doesn't stand for anything.
- That doesn't make any sense.
- I know. I don't know what's going on,
but they do stand for safety.
- That's a good point.
And yeah, I guess so they probably
fire test these gloves and stuff.
These, I mean, we've seen in the past,
we tested a Sparco racing suit.
- The fake one. - Yeah.
(man screams)
- All right, we have a ballistic gel hand
complete with bones,
which is a little unsettling.
- It's a thick, little hand.
- It's a very think palm.
- I don't know if our gloves are gonna fit that meaty thing.
- Yeah, we're gonna put our glove
on this cool hand right here
and see what happens.
(Nolan and Zach giggle)
- All right, I think we're gonna at least have to
cut off the thumb to try to get this glove in here.
All right, well the good news about these gloves is
that the material's the same throughout.
So we can't quite get the fingers up into the finger slots,
but it's inside of the gloves.
So we'll just torch it down here.
See what happens. - Let's do it.
- [Zach] Our real Sparco gloves
are made out of a material called Nomex,
a flame resistant fiber that doesn't melt or combust.
The SFI rating means that
these should withstand fire for 12 seconds
before the driver would get a second degree burn
giving them enough time to escape a flaming vehicle.
Our fake gloves claim to be fire resistant.
But there's only one way to find out,
by lighting them both on fire.
All right, so up first we have our real Sparco glove.
Let's see how this thing does.
- Three, two, one.
- [Nolan] Oh, that's burning through way fast.
That would hurt.
- [Zach] It's definitely a little crispy.
Yeah, this thing might have just become one
with the glove.
Oh, it's wet and gross.
And the tips are a little melty.
Okay, we got a little soft.
So your skin would be a little bit boiled.
- [Nolan] Yeah, let's let that cool off a little bit.
Doesn't look like it went completely through.
I mean the first layer definitely got damaged pretty bad.
That looks pretty thin right there,
but nothing burned completely.
So let's give that other glove a shot.
- Yeah, I have a feeling the fake glove is gonna
do a lot worse.
- [Marshall] Three, two, one, go.
- [Nolan] Oh no.
- [Marshall] Oh boy, she's going up!
- [Zach] Oh boy.
- [Marshall] And stop.
- [Nolan] Okay.
- That's on fire.
- [Nolan] All right, yeah. - It's not supposed to
catch on fire. - [Nolan] No.
- Marshall!
- [Zach] Oh, thanks man.
- [Nolan] Okay, as you can see the glove burned through
all the way to the hands.
- [Zach] We got melted skin, bones are coming out.
- [Nolan] Turn the skin to, oh, wow.
Turn the skin to jelly.
- Yeah, you couldn't see through the other glove.
- [Nolan] No, you could not.
- Most of this glove is now gone.
All right, so to our earlier question.
Are these gloves chillers or are they killers?
- [Nolan] I mean, I think they're killers.
- [Zach] I think they're killers.
- [Nolan] They caught on fire.
- Yeah, okay. Now let's talk about
one of the more likely things you are
to actually buy in terms of replica stuff, wheels.
All right, up next,
we're looking at some real wheels
versus some replica wheels.
They look very similar,
but they couldn't be more different.
Just like us.
These are Volk TE37.
They're a forged wheel
and they cost about $3,000 a set or about 750 a piece.
These are MSTs MT01
and they do look similar.
They cost about $900 a set,
which is about 225 bucks a piece.
So a lot cheaper than these. - A lot, a lot.
- Now they do look pretty similar,
but that's where the similarities really end.
These are forged,
which means they start out as a solid billet of steel,
really in this case aluminum alloy.
And then that is like pulverized
and pressed into the final shape,
which gives you a really tight grain structure
and a lot of strength.
But these are not forged to their detriment.
These cheap wheels are gravity cast.
Yeah, they just dump hot metal in.
They're like, okay, good.
So the density of the grain structure
is gonna be a lot lower
and there's a lot more chance of like a gap
or a bubble in a spoke. - [Nolan] Air pocket
- [Zach] Yeah, and having some unsuspected weakness
in the wheel so to speak.
Okay, because these wheels are made differently
that means they're gonna weigh differently.
So let's find out.
- [Scale] 23.2 pounds.
- 23.2 pounds. - Wow.
This doesn't feel like 23.2.
- What do you guess, 18.1?
- I'm gonna say over, dude.
- Over? Heavier than these.
- Yeah. - Could be.
- [Scale] 18.8 pounds. - Oh.
- I was way off. - Very close.
I wouldn't be using these cheap wheels for like,
a track built car.
But if you're just rolling around,
you wanna look cool, I get it.
- I get it.
Driving around town,
having stylish wheels in your car,
that's nice enough.
But we're here for safety, Jobe.
- We gotta find out
if they're worth carrying some precious cargo.
Like what if you got your kid, Jarvis,
in the backseat of your Cabrio?
You sure wouldn't want to get any blood
on their brand new donut media T-shirt
that they got at donutmedia.com would you?
Meet me on the roof, Nolan.
- I have to go on the roof? - You take the back way.
I'm gonna go up the normal way.
- Okay.
- Okay, so here we got a little test rigged up.
We're gonna drop these wheels off the roof.
We gotta pulley up there
and we're just gonna have 'em tied to this rope
so that they can kind of come down repeatably.
I want 'em to hit nice and flat.
I want 'em to both hit the same.
And furthermore, we're gonna try to hit
in between a spoke
so that we're not going straight spoke to ground.
We want to give it the best chance to bend.
That makes sense.
Okay, without further ado we have a Volk TE37
up on the roof.
We're about to drop it on the ground.
See what happens?
Nolan, you ready? - Yep.
- Three, two, one, drop that wheel.
(wheel clatters)
- That was painful.
- A little bit of me died.
- Sorry, Jimmy.
- Looks pretty dang good.
We got a slight little flat spot there
on both sides.
Looks like it hit pretty good and square.
- Yeah. - [Zach] I mean
that's still drivable, no doubt.
- Totally. - It's also
definitely fixable, you know.
Wheels can be straightened out
and that's a pretty slight dent.
Probably enough to cause a little bit of a vibration.
Not too bad.
All right, the Volk handled our drop test pretty well.
And now it's time to see how the MST knockoff does.
You ready, Nolan? - [Nolan] Yep.
- Three, two, one, drop that wheel.
(rim clatters) Oh!
Way bigger dent, way bigger dent.
- [Crowd] Oh!
- That might not hold air.
At least, it's gonna feel pretty weird in your butt.
- Holy, in my butt?
- After dropping them,
we put both wheels on our wheel balancer
and as you can see,
the real TE37 is still in relatively good shape,
but our fake wheel is gonna be a rough ride
and probably wouldn't even hold air.
But let's be honest,
you're never gonna drop your wheels off of a roof.
So we wanted to test these on the streets
in a real situation,
a big fat pothole.
And lucky for us finding potholes is easy.
We found a website that lets people report roadside issues
and there are a ton of potholes in LA.
We checked out a bunch of 'em,
found the biggest one we could.
All right, so first Justin's gonna drive over the pothole
with our real Volk TE37 at the speed limit.
Dealt with it pretty good from what I can see.
Now, let's see about those replicas.
(car speeds)
And then we realized our big problem.
The tires on our car were too fat
and the pothole just wasn't deep enough to do any damage.
So we went back to the drawing board
and came up with a better way of damaging wheels,
driving straight over a fat ol' curb.
All right, so what we're doing here,
we're obviously gonna run over these parking blocks,
but we wanted to line this up
so that we hit in between spokes.
That's gonna be the weakest area of a wheel.
If we hit directly to the spoke,
you know, it's a little bit stronger there.
So we want to give these things the best chance of breaking
without having to go too crazy fast
Three, two, one, go!
(suspenseful music)
- [Crowd] Oh! - Oh my god.
Ate it right up.
Let's go see how the wheel fared.
This is the Volk TE37, the real wheel.
And I don't see a lick of damage on this wheel.
We were aimed at this area right here.
You can see the paint got a little bit messed up here
but I don't see a dent.
- Wow. - And it still
seems to be holding air.
That's pretty impressive.
- Wow. - Dang,
took a chunk out of the parking block itself.
That must be a strong wheel.
And we decided to hit it one more time.
Just for good measure. Science.
Justin, are you ready?
Three, two, one, go!
- [Nolan] Oh God.
Oh, sweet Jesus.
- [Zach] Ooh!
- [Crew 1] Oh. - [Crew 2] Ooh.
- [Crew 1] Go pros.
- [Zach] Go pros, damn! - [Crew 1] Go pros.
- [Justin] I think I hit 30 on that one.
- Okay, we got a little bit of a bend
right here on made in Japan,
right in between the spokes.
That was a hard hit to only do that.
That's pretty freaking impressive.
Now I kind of wanna see how the cheap wheels hold up.
Okay, we've got the replica wheel installed
and we're gonna go through the test again.
Okay, Justin, are you ready?
Three, two, one, go!
(car speeds)
Whoa!
The suspension on this car has taken a beating
but it just keeps eating.
Chrysler, you did a great job.
- Jarvis took a hit.
- Jarvis lost their hair.
Looks like you did pretty well.
We came a little bit close to a spoke
but I think if we crank the speed up
and do it again, we'll see some damage.
There's definitely some suspension components
that are in the process of breaking.
I'll be impressed
if we get to drive this thing back to the shop.
All right, Justin,
three, two, one, go!
Oh God!
- [Crowd] Oh!
- Oh! Oh! Well, we got a new dent
and it's definitely worse than the other one.
So now we have two pretty significant dents
and that honestly is pretty close to the spoke too.
But it's still dented like crazy.
Yeah, still holding airs so that's great.
But you know, definitely not as strong as the real wheel.
- No. No.
- All right, well it looks like the fake wheel did hold up.
It won't necessarily kill you,
even though it's not quite as strong as the real wheel.
- [Nolan] Yeah. - But you know what they say?
The strength comes safety.
- That is what they say, Jobe.
- They say it all the time.
- Hey, if you wanna win this legit
Volk racing TE37 signed by all the Donut hosts.
- And slightly used.
- Hit that join button down below.
We're gonna be giving it away to
one lucky Donut Underground member. Join today.
- [Zach and Nolan] If you like seeing us destroy stuff,
check out this video.
(guys laugh)