Counterfeit Wheels Exposed: Side-by-Side vs Authentic Apex Wheels

Don’t Get Scammed: Counterfeit Sellers are Lying to You

One of the most dangerous misconceptions that we see spreading across social media is that cheap counterfeit wheels are the same as authentic Apex wheels. Lies are being spread that they are “backdoor” versions from the same source, just sold without the markup. Don’t get fooled by that scam. These claims are spread by counterfeiters trying to create false credibility to increase demand, when in reality the wheels are totally unrelated to authentic products, and are inferior in form and function.

In summary:

• None of the counterfeiters are a supplier to Apex & there is no backdoor source to our products.
• All counterfeits are very different from authentic Apex wheels.
• They don’t use our specialized forging blanks.
• They don’t use or match our 3D CAD models.
• Counterfeiters lie about testing and certification.
• They can fake the style, but they can’t fake performance and safety.

Fake products are largely promoted through social media shorts and marketplaces like Facebook, all while being pushed by paid influencers using eye-catching headlines to promote the lies and false narratives driven by counterfeiters. This article is meant to give enthusiasts accurate, concise, and factual information to help stop the spread of misinformation, particularly as it relates to Apex wheels within the growing counterfeit misinformation problem.

As of now there’s no actual analysis or fact checking being done by influencers and commentators. None have ever done a side-by-side comparison because the differences between the products would be obvious and instantly disprove the claim that they are the same or related. Enthusiasts are trusting the opinion of unqualified “experts” whose sole motivations are simply to drive traffic to paid affiliate links or to grow their audiences with click bait opinions. There’s no technical analysis, no engineering details, and no talking about the things that actually matter when it comes to performance.

Despite counterfeits being a known issue across industries, many people don’t question the validity of the counterfeiter’s false claims despite how “too good to be true” they are. This has fooled many people into believing that they are buying from a legitimate source, when in fact they are buying from a source willing to mislead customers and cut corners just to sell more.

Key Differences

A Side by Side Comparison

We ordered a set of counterfeits in an identical size and comparable finish to our own wheels, in order to do an apples to apples comparison where enthusiasts can see examples of differences side by side.  We want to show why the fakes are forced to make those compromises, and how that affects you.

At first glance the fakes look very similar to authentic wheels to the average person. That quick glance is where the similarities end. Even small changes from a visual standpoint on a high performance wheel can have significant impacts to the strength, stiffness, brake clearances, and other features and functions.

By far the most common reason that people wrongly believe the counterfeits are from our manufacturing partner is because the counterfeit listings steal our trademarked logos, product images and videos. Most people understand the concept of a counterfeit and aren’t fooled by this but enough people are. These listings illegally use our copyrighted images, which results in customers seeing our product photos and on-car photos but receiving different quality products when they open the box.

The above image shows examples of images stolen from our site and then photoshopped with different backgrounds, cropping, and center caps. When our ML-10RT was launched, our copyrighted images and videos were being used within days, giving some people the impression that we were the ones buying from those suppliers. In reality they hadn’t even created a CAD model yet, but they were promoting availability using our imagery. They did the same with the TC-10RT images above. We’ve yet to see an image of a real world fake for that model, we’ve only seen our own content manipulated.

Counterfeiters also steal trademarked logos from our site and the web to make center caps and wheel engravings. Some are executed very poorly, as seen in the image above, but it’s often not apparent until arrival. While we do get a laugh at some of these, it’s proof that quality is being compromised during the most basic design and production stages, and is another example of why counterfeit wheels have no relation to authentic Apex products.

Fakes are Heavier:

Consider even the most basic performance feature, a wheel’s weight. Every counterfeit wheel that we’ve ever measured (or that we have seen measured) has been significantly heavier than an authentic Apex forged wheel in an equivalent size. In most cases, the difference is multiple extra pounds, with the counterfeit wheels being closer in weight to our less expensive flow formed wheels.

It begs the question: If they weigh more, how can these counterfeits be the same? Only a material or dimensional difference would explain why they weigh more. If the material or dimensions are different, then how could these wheels be associated with authentic versions in any way?

The reality is that they aren’t the same design because they have nothing to do with authentic products. Counterfeits don’t come from the same factory, the same engineers, or the same forging blanks. Counterfeit wheel companies use 2D photos off of our site to model a 3D part, but in doing so they miss out on critical design details. Everything is approximated: Every angle, every dimension, and every feature. By designing wheels this way they aren’t matching strength, stiffness, clearances, or performance. Their objective is to look similar enough to an uninformed buyer, not to be identical.

Fakes are Made from Cheap Forging Blanks

Forged wheels start from a forging blank. The blank is like the canvas of a painting, where the size and shape of the canvas limits what can be created. Our engineers spent years developing our own specialized wheel blanks in order to ensure we could clear more brakes, create lighter and stiffer designs, and add a lot more inner lip strength. Counterfeit wheels are made from generic, cheap forging blanks that are extra thin and lack available material in key areas needed for performance applications in order to cut costs.

Because of this, they have to compromise key features such as the depth of the spokes or the profile of the barrel, and it makes it impossible to match our wheel’s design because they can’t even put material where we do.

Consider the image below and notice how out of bounds the red line goes in the barrel and spoke area.

These off the shelf, economy-focused blanks save counterfeiters a lot of money, as the blanks they buy use much less material. To make the cheap blanks work, their designers compromise the dimensions of the spoke to fit within the blank’s restrictive and thin profile, all while trying to keep the face-on style of the wheel as close as possible. Face-on they can still look similar, but from a side view they are totally different.

The additional material used in our proprietary blanks is significant: a typical 18” blank may weigh 80-90 pounds before machining, while ours weigh ~120 pounds. While that additional material is expensive and less efficient than off the shelf economy blanks, the additional engineering flexibility it provides is critical when optimizing a wheel for motorsports where strength and stiffness matter, not just style.

Fakes Compromise the Spokes

Once you get closer to the wheel, you can really start to see the differences and how the thinner blank compromises the design. Straight on, these wheels may appear similar, but in the image above you can see that the spokes on authentic Apex wheels are almost 30% deeper front to back. That’s a terrifying difference to change on a high performance product engineered to the limits. Spoke depth like ours is how high strength and stiffness is achieved in a wheel.

Also worth noting is the width and depth of the side-milling (material removal) in the image above. The additional spoke depth allows us to mill a much wider cut into the spoke, and the additional strength afforded by that spoke depth means that we can make our spoke milling significantly deeper, making the wheel lighter.

Once you begin to understand the differences, it’s possible to spot a fake just by looking at the spokes and side milling.

Fakes Have Compromised Barrel Profiles

One of the easiest ways to spot a fake is by looking at the barrel. Authentic Apex wheels have a distinct barrel profile with a more aggressive dropwell to maximize brake clearance. This profile combined with our Sprint Spec inner lip can’t be copied with cheap forging blanks that were never designed for motorsport use. 100% of the fakes are made from cheap blanks with inferior brake clearance.

Additionally, our barrels never have ring lines on them. If you see any, you know immediately they are not authentic products.

Fakes Have Inferior Brake Clearance

One problem with cheap tapered barrel designs is that the barrel gets tighter the closer you get to the face of the wheel, which compromises caliper clearance, as seen in the illustration below.

As a practical example, our high clearance barrel design allowed us to produce 18” wheels specifically for the F8X chassis M3/M4 that will clear the OE 380mm brakes, which wasn’t possible with more traditional tapered barrels.

Fakes Have Primitive Mounting Pad Designs

The Apex rear hub pocketing is ~3x deeper than the counterfeit - that’s over an inch deeper. Photos on our website don’t show off this section well and it takes time to model this correctly without compromising the strength of the wheel. Because of this, it doesn’t get copied by counterfeiters.

It’s a significantly more expensive design choice optimized for weight reduction, as it requires more complicated engineering and longer machining time to remove that extra material. That’s not critical when spitting out high profit margin fakes.

Fakes Can’t Match Our Lip Profile

One of the most beneficial and hardest to implement features on our forged wheels is our Sprint Spec inner lip. Visually the design is simple and unassuming, but the location of that material makes a huge difference in how it performs. Getting material into what we internally nicknamed the “chin” of our lip was one of the primary reasons it took years for us to design our own forging dies that had enough material in the correct area to make that chin possible. Traditional blanks lack this extra material, so counterfeiters can only mimic the look by cutting deeper into a regular lip to create a C-channel look. Although it only looks like a few millimeters of difference, the effectiveness of the material when properly placed changes drastically.

The image above clearly illustrates the corner that is being cut to save money. Our lip adds 32% extra material to the inner lip area over a standard lip to increase its strength and rigidity.

For more information about our Sprint Spec inner lip design and what makes it such an important feature, reference this article: Meet the Stronger Apex Sprint Spec Inner Lip

Fakes Don’t Fit Caps Well

Another commonly overlooked feature of authentic Apex products is OEM center cap support for most of our wheels. This is a feature that many customers don’t even realize they’re looking for, until they want to run a clean, OEM+ look with factory center caps.

The counterfeit wheels we tested did not share this feature. Instead, they used generic-fit center caps with a diameter and attachment style that didn’t mirror any OEM caps that we were aware of. When we ordered the fake set, this compatibility issue wasn’t disclosed pre-sale to us, and we’ve had multiple instances of customers who purchased counterfeit products reaching out to us to buy authentic center caps, only to find that they won’t fit. We’ve even seen an influencer mangle their counterfeit wheels with a grinder trying to make a cap fit.

Fakes are Heavy in Odd Places

Other seemingly small differences exist across the counterfeit product, and it’s impossible for us to list every possible difference between the wheels as literally everything is different.

As one additional example, in the image above you can see the excess webbing above the lug hole that likely stems from conducting minimal and rushed FEA in an effort to save time and cost, rather than properly optimize the strength and weight of a wheel. This is the difference between amateur design and our team of engineering professionals who spend months optimizing new wheels. Seemingly small differences like this are what adds up to the significant weight difference that was highlighted earlier in this article.

Testing and Certification

We’re working on a whole separate article on this topic as there are a lot of lies, assumptions, and misunderstandings about wheel testing and certification. This topic is what puts consumers at the greatest safety risk.

The summary is that all counterfeiters lie about testing and certification to save themselves a fortune at the buyer’s risk/expense. Simply put, they are not conducting tests at all, or when they do, then they are not testing to the required levels. It’s almost always just skipped.

To show definitive proof of this, consider the following: on the counterfeit set that we purchased, there’s clear evidence that the testing standards they claim to meet are objectively false. The counterfeits we purchased were engraved with “JWL/VIA” on the barrels of the wheel, along with a claimed 720kg load rating. To a misinformed customer, this looks completely legitimate and in theory adds a lot of value. They’re professionally tested right? Nope. They’re just engraved with the logos.

The JWL standard for 5x130 bolt pattern wheels requires wheels to be manufactured and destructively tested to a 735kg load rating - FEA simulations do not count. By being labeled as under the limit it immediately isn’t JWL compliant and shouldn’t be stamped with the JWL marking. Any legitimate manufacturer would never go through the costly destructive testing at a load that is lower and invalid. Counterfeit factories don’t care. They engrave it and ship it, saving time and costs while leaving the end customer in the dark and carrying all the risk.

Similarly, the VIA requires wheels to be physically sent to their laboratory in Japan for independent physical testing, and they will not certify or even begin a test on a wheel that has the wrong load rating engraved on it. We’ve had wheels declined for listing the weight in pounds instead of kilograms; they are that picky about load markings. Because the counterfeit wheel we received could never qualify to be tested by the VIA, their use of the VIA logo is similarly fraudulent. Plus, if it were registered, it would be listed in the VIA’s online database of results we could see. (Hint: it’s not in the results database)

These are also falsely stamped SAE J2530. That is a totally different test which isn’t automatically met while doing the JWL testing. SAE testing requires six destructive tests at different load parameters, so you can’t run a test and claim it’s both JWL and SAE. The SAE test alone would be six additional wheels that would have to be made and then destroyed for every single size that’s produced. At the price points of counterfeit wheels, testing to any one of these standards is prohibitively expensive, let alone all of them.

From a cost and timing standpoint it’s impossible for counterfeit manufacturers to test to the standards they claim to meet, and once people understand the numbers that go into it, it becomes obvious. To us, hearing their testing claims is like hearing someone say they slow smoke ribs in two minutes.

Don’t get fooled by the footage of a single test as these companies adapt to intensifying scrutiny. They can make ringers, and the tests are not independently run. It’s easy to run one test, but it would take hundreds of tests or more to match the scale of their claims. They’re saving millions in testing costs.

We’ll be creating an extensive write-up showing how counterfeit manufacturers skip testing, how they promote misleading claims, and what that really means for buyers. We’ll also conduct destructive tests on counterfeit products with an independent lab.

Wheel load ratings are a critical safety element of a vehicle, and objectively false claims like what we saw on our counterfeit set should raise major red flags for any potential consumer. If a counterfeit seller is willing to lie about something as critical as load rating, what else are they willing to lie about? These money saving short cuts are what makes them so dangerous to do business with.

Conclusion

For almost two decades, Apex has been designing wheels with one specific goal in mind: performance above all else. We’ve been manufacturing wheels since long before counterfeits started to appear, and that philosophy has never wavered.

If nothing else, we want enthusiasts to take away the following from this article:

• Counterfeit wheels do not come from the same factory as authentic Apex wheels.
• • Our manufacturing partners are professional, and optimized for our high volumes and the volume of OEMs. It would be silly of them to sell one set at a time and lose our volume business over trademark infringement.
• Counterfeit wheels are not made from the same forging blanks.
• • They buy cheap, thin blanks and distort designs to fit within their restrictive dimensions.
• Counterfeit wheels are not based on our design files.
• • While the wheels may look similar at a quick glance, each dimension is measurably different. The counterfeit product is designed based only on photos of our wheels. They don’t have access to samples or data files.
• Counterfeits are made by amateur engineers that are rushed to mimic a design.
• • Counterfeiters use primitive mesh models and conduct basic FEA. They can’t afford the time to invest into doing it well. They are heavy as a result.
• Counterfeit listings promote fake/false certificates and testing documents.
• • Your safety is at risk. Testing has been totally thrown out the window.
  • All Apex designs are independently tested by third party labs to verify the engineering that we put into our products.

Real Performance means real engineering, and that’s something you can only get when you buy from a company that’s run by enthusiasts for enthusiasts.

It’s clear that counterfeiters and the influencers who make money promoting them have a strong motivation to spread the false narrative that the fakes they sell are related to authentic products and are equal in quality. Some influencers might even believe the misinformation and aren’t spreading it with intentional malice, but that would require blindly trusting and parroting the information they’ve heard (without proof) from questionable sellers on questionable marketplaces. People with a microphone have a duty to their followers to research and vet information or they risk spreading fake news and harming the community. It seems some people really do believe everything said by the guy selling the $200 Rolex from his trench coat.

The saying “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” absolutely applies here. Consumers should be very wary of the opinions and misinformation being spread about counterfeits and backdoor deals. Check and see if there are affiliate links or offers to link to specific suppliers as a tell tale sign of bias. If there are, then the seller likely isn’t out there to protect your best interests - they’re motivated for you to click and buy. Look for proof to back up their claims. Seeing trademarked logos and similar styles is not proof.

Please reach out to us if you’re looking at a set of new or used wheels and you’re concerned about their authenticity. We’ll gladly take a look at a listing and help determine if they’re real or not.