车轮
chē lún · HSK 7
wheel
🛞 车轮 = vehicle + wheel/round — the round part of a vehicle
车 (chē) means vehicle or car. 轮 (lún) means wheel or something round that rotates. Together they literally spell out vehicle-wheel. The lún sound even echoes 'loon' — think of wheels looping round and round like a loon circling a lake.
车 — pictograph of a chariot/cart
车 is a pictograph originally drawn as a top-down view of a chariot, showing the axle, wheels, and carriage box. The ancient form 車 clearly depicted two wheels connected by an axle. It still means vehicle, cart, or car today.
轮 — car radical 车 + 仑 (phonetic)
轮 is a semantic-phonetic compound. The left side 车 (chē, 'cart/vehicle') gives the meaning, since 轮 originally referred to a wheel. The right side 仑 supplies the sound 'lún'. From 'wheel' it extended to related senses like 'rotate', 'take turns', and 'round'.