I had to purchase a REAL impact gun to make this happen: 1/2" NitroCat (from NorthernTool)- 1,295 ft-lbs of torque!
Now that sounds like a nice impact gun, I must look into that. I have a nice Chicago Pneumatic 1/2" impact gun that was about as good as I could find at the time (15+ years ago?) without stepping into a Snap-On truck, and even then, this gun was still $500 iirc. However, I think the torque specs are something like 450 ft/lbs forward and 650 reverse...or something like that.
Point is, it usually will not remove rusty wheel bolts. I usually use a 3 ft piece of pipe on a 24" power bar (and I broke one of those a few months back trying to break wheel bolts loose).
Anyway, I blame it on old wheel bolts that are both rusty and stretched (or the threads are deformed somehow). When I took my old Beetle into VW for an alignment last spring, it came back out with 20x new wheel bolts installed...not sure why...I didn't ask OR pay for them, but they were there. They were no problem to remove, even when torqued properly.
I have since put 20x new wheel bolts on my Golf as well, and they've been fine as well.
The 06 Jetta I just bought...back to typical VW.... I had to use about 4 ft of leverage on every bolt, and even then I had to bounce on them before I got the big "CRACK" and they came loose. That was all 20 of them, and some of them were really tough to crack. Welcome to the rust belt...lol.