Sitting in a car park yesterday I was elevated in a moment of meditation to notice that the wheels on every# car I could see had an odd number of spokes.
Five spokes and seven seemed the most frequent but there was one with three spokes. There were none I could see with four, six or eight. Googling revealed this article which sort of discusses the axes of symmetry of a Ferrari wheel (five spokes) but only refers to the aesthetics rather than there being any engineering rationale behind the oddness.
A Google images search seems to indicate that odd is by far the overwhelming favourite for spokes but not exclusively so. It would seem that eight is not uncommon among what seem to be high-performance cars (those that are involved in high speed racing for example). Thus maybe it is just aesthetic. It would be interesting to hear what others think.
Five spokes and seven seemed the most frequent but there was one with three spokes. There were none I could see with four, six or eight. Googling revealed this article which sort of discusses the axes of symmetry of a Ferrari wheel (five spokes) but only refers to the aesthetics rather than there being any engineering rationale behind the oddness.
A Google images search seems to indicate that odd is by far the overwhelming favourite for spokes but not exclusively so. It would seem that eight is not uncommon among what seem to be high-performance cars (those that are involved in high speed racing for example). Thus maybe it is just aesthetic. It would be interesting to hear what others think.
