Why it that the third and the fourth strokes of 车 and 轮 are not the same?

In 车 the third stroke is horizontal and the fourth is vertical. With 轮 (and most of the other characters like it)it is just the opposite.

What am I missing?

I remember this being raised before and there was some kind of logical reasoning behind it, but I'll wait for George the stroke master to chime in as I don't really remember the justification.

My bad. Searched it now:

http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=9734886

http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=45183791

This rule is a kind of 'leech' to me. I can not see, how enforcing this helps that much in learning the character. Why not allow the 车 way as well when writing 轮 type of characters?

If I may quote nick "Our philosophy on stroke order is that it should help learn characters, not get in the way."

Since this is not a very common rule, I kept making this mistake. I suppose I wont be anymore now that I know about it. But its been a pain in the 433 for so long now :)

Is this kind of rules so important when learning to write?

If you have seen examples of how 行书 and 草书 are written, you might have noticed that the stokes all tend to link up together. So my own hypothesis is that since the 车 in 轮 is going to be link up with the 仑 on its right, so it is logical to have the horizontal stroke in 车 to be the last stroke, so that it can link up with 仑. Again since the stand alone 车 is going to link up with the character below it (traditionally Chinese is written from top to bottom), then it is just as logical to have the vertical stroke as the last stroke.

I have found this confusing as well. Not just for 轮 but any that have a 车. For example 载, 转, 库, 连 etc. Does anyone know a stroke order rule for this?

You guys are more professional than most Chinese! Maybe there is a Chinese national site for this, my stroke order dictionary 小学生全笔顺字典 says
载 and 转 are the same as 轮, first vertical and then horizontal.
库 and 连 are the same as 车, first horizontal and then vertical...

So I guess when 车 is a radical, it's always written differently. But that's what my stroke order dictionary for Chinese babies says, I don't dare to make a conclusion.

When 车 is used in horizontal composition like that, the horizontal stroke becomes a rising stroke, and from that point it becomes the final stroke cutting through the vertical rather than the other way around, according to the cutting-strokes-last rule. That's my interpretation, anyway. All the stroke order authorities are pretty solid on this distinction, so we don't have the alternative form in there.

If it bothers you, perhaps you can turn down the stroke order sensitivity so that it's more likely for the alternate order to be recognized?

My hypothesis can also be used to explain these characters.

载 – After finishing 车, the next stroke is on its right. So the last stroke of 车 is the horizontal stroke.
转 – This can be explained in the same way as 轮.
库 – After writing 车, the whole character is finished. So the vertical stroke is the last stroke.
连 – Since the next stroke after 车 is on the upper left corner, neither the horizontal nor the vertical stroke will land the pen in the correct position. In this case, the stroke order for the stand alone character is used.

By the way, the component 牛, 牜 can be explained in the same way.

http://www.skritter.com/stroke-order
pts, I think you're right: the standard stroke order rules 1-9 are indeed just patterns found when looking at the way characters are written, which comes from how you would order the strokes to do them cursively. Hence the stroke orders changing on the final dots in characters upon the switch from usually writing top-to-bottom to left-to-right.

stroke orders sometimes vary between radicals and the standing variants of those radicals, as has been pointed out by nick.