It shouldn’t be too surprising to learn that Porsche is extremely detail oriented. But the company is so obsessive over everything, it even has an official policy on an appropriate way to align the company’s crest in the center caps of every wheel on every single one of its cars.




There I was at the Taycan reveal at Niagara Falls last month, minding my own business, doing my job and taking some photos of the Turbo S model on display. When taking a detail shot of one of the car’s impressive two-tone wheels, I made a slight adjustment.


Having learned, many moons ago, that you can fairly easily turn the center caps of most modern wheels just with your fingers to realign the logo on the cap however you want, I turned the Porsche crest as perfect North-South as I could get it, to take this photo:

It did not take long for a Porsche rep to approach me and ask, essentially, what on god’s green earth did I think I was fucking doing? Just kidding, they were much more polite. But that’s probably what they were thinking.



Anyway, without another word, the Porsche rep moved the cap crest back to its previous alignment which, to my eyes, was almost as good as random. So I asked why.


He kindly informed me that Porsche has a very specific way of aligning the crest on the wheels of all of its company’s cars, all the way from a display model at a very corporate reveal event like I was at, down to the press cars delivered to journalists around the world, all the way down to the cars that leave every dealership and official Porsche service center (or at least, that’s how it’s supposed to be).


So what’s this not-so-secret formula for the perfect crest alignment? Simple.

Turn the center cap until the bottom point of the crest is pointing to the wheel lock. The wheel lock is also supposed to always be lined up with the tire inflation nozzle. If there isn’t a wheel lock on the wheel, then you turn the center cap until the lower point of the crest lines up with the tire nozzle.


You can see it done here on the Porsche Cayenne Coupe test car I drove on an official Porsche trip earlier this year:


And you can see it here on the Boxster GTS press car I had a couple of weeks ago:


You can even see it done properly on Porsche’s online configurator:




That’s the official way to do it, on every wheel, on every Porsche, as long as they can help it.

If you own a Porsche, stop whatever you’re doing right now and go check if your center caps are properly aligned. If not, please reconsider whoever you have working on your car for the future. They clearly have no fucking clue what they’re doing.