You may recall a few weeks ago I wrote about how a friend of mine hunted down the ratty Suzuki Esteem used in the popular television show Better Call Saul; the Esteem was a wonderfully-cast car, an incredibly tattered and sad machine that echoed the desperate situation of the show’s protagonist perfectly. My friend, Tory, who bought the car for an objectively absurd-sounding $4,000, is the sort of person who, once he gets a car, he wants whatever he’s doing with that car to be just right. In the case of the Esteem, “just right” means a car that is extremely shitty, a carefully-curated amalgam of just the right sort of automotive neglect, despair, and exhaustion. It also means that Tory now finds himself in the ridiculous situation of trying to source just the right kind of crappy, bargain-bin-at-Pep Boys plastic wheel covers, and for that, he needs our help. So let’s see what we can do.
What I like about this particular automotive quest is that it feels like the sort of hunt any automotive restorer might be on to find some sort of rare, sought-after part, like, say, some rare grille bezel from a 1937 Delahaye or something, except this is the sort of part that has negative value, and is most often seen propped up against the post of a yield sign on a traffic island near where it was flung off the right rear wheel of a speeding Altima.
Okay, let’s take a look at the wheel cover in question here, in a screenshot from Better Call Saul:
See those? You’ve probably seen wheel covers like those a billion times, and, ideally, never gave them more than a moment’s thought. They’re directional, and always seem to be going the wrong way, and the bolts on the face of them are fake little plastic bas-relief nubs. They’re cheap crap.
You’d think he’d be able to find them anywhere, and he almost can, but the problem is that, for Tory, almost isn’t good enough. He’s found ones that are pretty close, but after scouring eBay and other sites, he has yet to come up with the exact match he demands.
So, this is where all you fantastic automotive geeks come in; if there is any community of gearheads on the internet with a chance in hell of identifying a specific kind of crappy aftermarket plastic wheel cover probably from the early-ish 2000s, it’s got to be this one, right? It’s got to be the Autopian community, the champions of details far too mundane for the normal mind to care about, and for whom crappiness is a virtue!
So, can we help Tory restore this car to its original – I can’t really say glory here, can I – um, state? And, if we can identify these wheel covers, I think the good news is he doesn’t even need a full set of four to make the car right, so that helps.
I know this may sound absurd, but look, the man got this shitbox running again and everything:
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Clearly, this project means a lot to him, and who are we to yuck anyone’s yum, right? So any investigative help or insights would be much appreciated. Perhaps one of you has a couple of these rolling around in your garage, perhaps acting as a bowl to hold random bolts and nuts and bits of wire? Who knows? Maybe we’ll get lucky!
A massive thank you for everyone’s detective skills here! As luck would have it, I was contacted by Andrew L on Instagram after his brother read this article here on The Autopian. He had exactly one of these in stock in his store where he specializes in, you guessed it, hubcaps. For those wondering, it’s made in Taiwan, and this specific wheel cover is model KH-320. It ships out on Monday and thanks to Andrew and his brother, I can now use my time for more constructive things rather than daily eBay searches. Again, thanks to the community here for an automotive mystery solved!
Don’t forget to hold the cap in place with zip ties. They always magically appear on my car each time it gets serviced.