What you notice near the end of the lease
If you lease a BMW in Brooklyn, you already know the wheels take a beating you didn't sign up for. You notice it when you're circling for parking on a Tuesday and clip a curb on Cortelyou Road, or when you feel a thud coming off the Belt Parkway near a patch that never got properly repaved. By month thirty or so, most people start looking at the wheels differently. That's usually when the lease-end letter arrives, and the wording about wheel and tire condition starts to matter in a way it didn't at signing.
Why Brooklyn streets are hard on wheels
This isn't really about how carefully you drive. It's about the roads themselves. A lot of Brooklyn's street grid was laid down decades before anyone was thinking about modern low-profile tires, and the freeze-thaw cycle every winter chews up the asphalt from underneath. Potholes open up fast in February and March, get patched badly, and reopen by the next cold snap. Add alternate side parking, which forces daily maneuvering into tight spots between other cars, and curb rash becomes almost routine rather than a rare accident.
Street salt is the other factor. It keeps the roads passable in a Nor'easter, but it's corrosive, and it gets into wheel wells and brake components over a winter. Combined with road grit and the general wear of stop-and-go traffic on avenues like Flatbush or Fourth, tires and wheels age faster here than they would somewhere with wider lanes and less winter maintenance chemical exposure.
More on this from Reading List Wheel And Tire Charges At The End Of A Luxury Lease.
What you can actually check yourself
Before the lease-end inspection, walk around the car with a flashlight in decent daylight, not under a streetlamp. Look at each wheel rim for scrapes, gouges, or bends, especially on the inside edge where curb strikes usually land. Run a hand along the tire sidewalls for bulges or cracking. Check tread depth with a coin: if the tread doesn't cover much of the coin's edge, the tires are close to or past what most lease agreements consider normal wear.
Also check tire age, not just tread. The date code is stamped on the sidewall, four digits, the last two being the year. A tire can look fine and still be six or seven years old, which some lease-end inspections flag on its own, separate from wear.
What's normal wear and what isn't
Leasing companies generally distinguish between ordinary wear and damage. A little curb scuffing on a wheel that doesn't go past the clear coat is usually treated as normal. A gouge deep enough to catch a fingernail, a bent rim that causes a vibration at speed, or a crack in the wheel itself is not. Tires are judged mostly by tread depth and whether the wear is even across the tire. Uneven wear, like more tread gone on the inside edge, points to an alignment problem that a lease company will often charge for as if it were owner neglect, even if it was really a pothole strike nobody thought much of at the time.
When to stop guessing and get it looked at
If you find visible bends, cracks, or a wheel that clearly doesn't sit flush anymore, that's past the point of a homeowner-style fix-it-yourself judgment call. A tire shop or the dealer's service department can tell you in ten minutes whether a wheel is repairable or needs replacing, and whether a tire is still within legal and lease-acceptable tread limits. It's worth doing this a month or two before the actual lease-end inspection, not the day before. That gives you time to either replace a wheel or tire yourself, often for less than the lease company's return-condition charge, or to decide the charge is smaller than the cost of fixing it and just accept it.
One more thing worth doing early: take dated photos of every wheel and tire, from a few angles, while parked somewhere with even light, ideally on a dry day rather than a wet one. If there's ever a dispute about whether damage happened before or after a certain date, having your own record beats arguing from memory.