You can spend time getting your car’s bodywork spotless, but if you neglect the wheels it will be wasted effort. Dirty rims are a turn-off – and you need to work at keeping them gleaming.

Apply a wheel polish after cleaning, and you’ll give them a super shine, yet also help stem the build-up of road grime and dreaded brake dust. The makers of these wheel waxes and barrier products claim your alloys will be easier to clean next time, too. But is it worth shelling out extra on a dedicated wheel polish? We put eight top sellers to the test to see which shone for us.

The test
We applied all our waxes and polishes to sections of the front rims on our test car, after first cleaning it with our serial award winner Wonder Wheels.