Our car has about 135k miles. It is a great car, except in the past year we have started to have braking problems. Not sure if this is relative, but we live in Hawaii. About a year ago, the brakes started acting wierd. When you depress them, there is a grindy feeling and they don’t brake at the rate they should. (It takes twice as long to brake as normally would.) This happens approximately once out of every 20 brake depressions.
We took the car into the shop and they polished the rotors. That did nothing. We took it in to a different location (Goodyear) and they told us we definitely needed new rotors and pads, which I had them do. The car worked perfectly for about a week, and then started doing the grinding when you depress the brakes, this time it happened about once for every 40-50 times.
We took it back and they polished the (brand new) rotors, this didn’t seem to help. About a week after this, the VSC Check Engine Light came on (Vertical Stability Control), which, when we read the manual, said this had to do with brakes/suspension, etc. So we thought this was the problem and took it in to the Lexus dealer in Hawaii. The Lexus dealer replaced an 02 sensor in the engine, and said the brakes were fine.
The car still does the grinding about every 40-50 braking depressions. Basically you get normal resistance and normal braking, and then every 50th time, the resistance to the brake pedal goes out, and it starts grinding. You have to slam on the brakes to get it to stop in the normal distance that a regular depression would get you. So far two different auto shops and the Hawaii Lexus dealer have told us the car is fine, nobody knows why it is doing this. HELP!