Physics driven cars without Wheel Colliders. Is it practicable?

Instead of using Wheel Colliders, I'm aiming to use cylindrical mesh colliders as wheels for vehicles.

Initially the obvious solution to me was to attach four rigidbody cylinders to a rigidbody car with configurable joints, with limited upward/downward movement for suspension and free forward/backward rotation for rolling the car along. This worked pretty well until I adjusted the rigidbodys' mass to realistic values, resulting in large forces moving and bending the joints ways I don't want.

Then I tried keeping the wheel from moving and rotating the wrong way by scripting transform limits:

 Target.localPosition.x = 0;
 Target.localPosition.z = 0;
 Target.localRotation.y = 0;
 Target.localRotation.z = 0;

But it seems that this prevents proper rotation of the wheels and allows the wheels to exert forces in the direction it would want to move and bend were it not contsrained by script.

I tried searching for similar projects or tutorials and I couldn't find any. Any suggestions?

Thanks!