You may not think it, but it can be pretty easy to damage alloy wheels. Curbs are a pretty common culprit, but even routine cleaning (whether you do it yourself or go through a carwash) or road salt can eat away at them. Over time.

So, what can you do?

Your options:

• Live with it. Wear and tear happens, right?
• Try to fix it yourself. We'll touch on this in a bit.
• Pay a body shop. You could run your car down to an auto body shop, and have them sand and repaint the wheel.

Before hiring a shop, let's see on average how much it will cost, and how long it will take.

We emailed just over 40 repair shops across the United States, asking for a time and cost estimate on this wheel:

Only five shops responded, but they all provided really close estimates:

The average cost was $116

Lowest quote: $99
Highest quote: $135

The average time varied by quite a bit: the repair could take anywhere from just 40 minutes to two days.

Thankfully there is an alternative that is both consistently cheaper faster: