Left hand lug nuts are back, baby!

Bewy said
72blu,
Post #20. Uh.....
The car needs nuts/bolts to hold the wheels on, the size will be the same for 4 wheels. How much extra do you think it will cost to make half of them RH thread & half of them LH? A few cents per car?
A loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooot less than adding GPS/governor locks, breathaliser i'lock, distance sensors.
The point that you keep failing to get is that LH wheel studs was a safety device that had notionally zero cost. It has always surprised me that more companies did not adopt it. You seem to think nobody can make a mistake & not torque wheel nuts properly. Well they can & they have. A LH wheel that had has it's LH nuts tightened, say beyond finger tight, but not up to spec could quite well never come loose. Job done, LH threads. A LH wheel with RH threads with insufficiently tightened nuts will almost certainly come loose. And while astute drivers like the hobbyists that frequent forums like this might feel a wheel wobble or vibration of a loosening wheel, Grandma might not...

The rotational force exerted on a lug nut that's off the center axle is tiny. Tiny. If you tighten your lugs to even 50% of what they're supposed to be it would never be an issue. Do you think that the nuts on the RH threads on the right side of your car would tighten beyond finger tight? They won't. They might not unthread and fall off, but they're not going to magically tighten enough to solve any problems for you either.

And for every "grandma" that tortured their lug studs with finger tight lug nuts that wouldn't fall off but remained loose enough to cause issues later there's someone out there whose LH studs sheared off completely because the not-so-bright guy at the tire shop overtorqued the LH threads to the point of failure trying to loosen them. Heck some of those failures might even happen later on the road if they weren't completely twisted off to start with. There are plenty of pictures on this very forum about sheared off LH wheel studs.

They cause more problems than they solve. There are just as many people out there that can't grasp the concept of LH wheel studs as there are people that don't check their lug nut torques. They're probably the same people anyway, that's a ven diagram with a lot of overlap. And a few cents per car changes a lot of decisions at the manufacturing level. Pinto fuel tank bombs only cost a few cents per unit to solve, that went to production.

I just don't see the argument. The LH thread doesn't accomplish anything that a properly torqued lug nut doesn't already do. So unless you plan on leaving your lug nuts loose, there's no benefit at all. And there is a drawback, because somebody is gonna snap a few off at some point. And unless you're having the studs on your modern cars changed, you probably count everyday on the fact that with anything close to proper torque there's no issue.