Reducing brake pad wear seems like premature optimization to me. Good pads can last well north of 50k miles, with some claiming 100k. They're also dirt cheap. I haven't changed pads in almost 5 years and my brakes don't squeak yet.
Right. It's not like they can form a cartel and collectively decide how long a brake pad should last, just like the incandescent light bulb cartel [1] of the early 20th century or the NAND flash memory cartel of the 21st century.
Mate you're far too naive to believe what you're saying.
So? There would only be one "brake pad salesman" left, who would sell indestructible brake pads to car manufacturers, and all the others would go bust.
Would I be right that regenerative braking should substantially reduce brake pad wear?
I'm betting the pads on ours outlast our ownership of the car. (Note that I have absolutely nothing to base this on other than watching the "I'm braking using the motor and not the pads" meter.)
Not that I find lifetime brake pads to be a big selling point. Other than something like changing the oil, replacing brake pads has to be one of the easiest jobs to do (albeit with some of the greatest consequences should you screw it up). Even with new rotors, I might have to go grab a hammer to knock the old ones loose, then it's another 30 seconds to put the new one on.
It's a matter of proportion. One does not expect brake disks to wear after 2,000km, that's plain defective. If it were 50,000km I'd agree that's more reasonable for a wear item.
Sure. My last car was a Mercedes AMG that needed new pads every 8-10k miles, so I might be a bit biased. But TBF my car before that was a Land Rover Discovery 3 and that was eating pads like crazy despite not driving it aggressively at all - I attributed it to the weight of the vehicle.
Why would you ever change a single brake pad? I’ve never done less than an axle’s worth of pads at a time (overwhelmingly four pads). I’m even a little surprised a dealer would agree to do that.
Nonsense. EVs and hybrids leverage regeneration for nearly all of their lifetime braking energy use. Its commonplace for EV brake pads to last the life of the vehicle today. Exceptions exist, but those are for particularly hard-braking drivers. Our Prius ran 200k miles on the factory brakes, for example.
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