I have the 17" stock Rims on my 01 SE. I like the way they look, but they seem to take some performance because they are so heavy. I saw some 17's on Tirerack.com that looked nice, and they wighed about 17 pounds each. How much heavier are our stock 17" rims. Would it help perforance and gas milage that much to put on lighter rims?

 

probably wouldn't help gas mileage much, but will help your accelleration times....

 

The stock rims weigh about 24 to 25 pounds. So that's quite a bit of weight you are shaving off. Plus it's directly related to the WHP so it's a larger effect of weight loss, as compared, to just taking the weight off the car itself.

 

I'm going to settle on a set of 15-16lb rims. Our stock rims weigh 25lbs each. I read something along the lines of: for every pound a rim weighs, that's like an additional 4lbs sitting in the car. So for each rim, there's 100lbs of extra weight that the car has to carry.

4 x 100 = 400lbs.

If you get rims that weigh 15lbs you're technically dropping about 160lbs. So instead of
100lbs of theoretical weight in the car per rim, there's only 60.

4 x 60 = 240lbs.

(Side note: It may or may not be 4lbs. It could be just a tad bit higher.)

 

Ceasar has to post here since he knows many things about this subject.