Compatible or Replacement Wheels

5x100 with a high enough offset, and your good to go without spacers or adapters (factory is 45offset, don't go less than that).

I put on Scion TC wheels, they bolt right up.

 

you can buy aftermarket steel wheels for around $50-$60 each, the center bore of a prius (& probably all 5x100 toyotas & scions) is 54.1mm. you can go to craigslist and find good winter tires with wheels coming off a dodge neon or cavalier or whatever, the problem with those is you won't be able to find hubcentric rings to adapt to your prius. hubcentric rings center a wheel onto your hub to prevent vibration and damage, and are designed to adapt an aftermarket wheel to an oem hub size, they don't make them to adapt oem to oem sizes, trust me I've tried.

Don't worry about offset because I don't think there is a single rear wheel drive vehicle on earth with a 5x100 bolt pattern (except the Miata so dont buy Miata wheels!!), so any wheel with a 5x100 pattern has an offset most likely designed for front wheel drive. If you see universal bolt pattern that usually (not always) means 5x4" (5x100mm) and 5x4.5" (5x114.3mm). Be careful buying old honda wheels as the civic only recently switched to 5 bolts and was 4 bolts for decades.

I think what the last poster was suggesting was that you put winter tires on your stock wheels and all season tires on a scion wheel as it wouldn't make asthetic sense to run nice 17" wheels in the winter and stock 15" wheels in the summer. I actually increased from 185 to 195/65R15 winter tires in order to make them interchangeable with my corolla and give the Prius more ground clearance since our cars cannot be rocked our of deep snow like a conventional car.

 

what happens in the instance of a different bore, I mean I know this must be common and there must be spacers for this, but I can not ever remember seeing them sold anywhere.

 

You can get the proper size and offset rim from Tire Rack starting as low as $65 for some that are decently light and good looking. You'll need some TPMS put on them. Rock Auto has them for under $60 each. A tire place will need to reset your TPMS set up and every time you switch back to the stock rims it will need to be done again, or you can search on this site for people that have figured out the system and with the simple use of a paper clip eliminated the warning light on the dash.

 

if you try to put a wheel with a smaller bore on the prius it obviously won't fit, if you try to put a wheel with a larger bore w/o a hubcentric ring (I've always preferred plastic over metal) the wheel will not be centered and will vibrate which will inevitably cause other damage.

this vibration is due to the fact that lug nuts are only designed to hold your wheels to the car, that's it, but when you put on a wheel with a larger bore and don't have the centering ring you are now asking those lug nuts to not just hold the wheel but also to center it, thus the vibration, in fact I think the first thing to get damaged will be lug nut(s) getting sheared off.

I do have a set of winter tires and wheels off a neon that I got for free from a foreign exchange student moving home and it has a center bore of 57.1, which is an oem chrysler size, as i said they don't make oem to oem hubcentric rings to make up for the 3mm difference with the Prius, but a tire shop in town told me its okay if its just a few millimeters, I don't care i'm not going to risk damaging my Prius so I'm better off selling them in november to a Neon owner . . . at a tidy profit as winter tires sell like hot cakes in november.

 

You can probably get stock Prius wheels from a local junkyard these days or at least get them off Craigslist.

 

I had the scion tc wheels and took them off after 100 miles. Now the stock wheels are on until I get the next set. They will be 16x7 rota slipstreams and offset is 40. The weight will be 1lb lighter than the stock wheel setup.

 

What year of scion rims did you use?

SM-G991U ?