I had to replace my rear brakes on my Infiniti QX50. The car only has 16,600 miles on it! I’m then told I’ll need front brakes, too! I’m completely astounded!!! Anyone else have to replace their brakes on a low mileage Infiniti?
Replacing front brakes on newer cars around 20K isn’t that unheard of. Front and rear at 17 k, a little unusual, but probably within what’s expected for a larger SUV. Besides the car and its brake system design it depends a lot on personal driving style. I’d suggest this isn’t something to worry about as long as they last at least 15k, just replace the brakes as needed.
Seems very premature to me. However, I do not know the driving style of the poster, how much of this mileage is short city driving with lots of stops, is it a hilly region? Also, it would be nice to know why they needed to change your rear pads. My guess is your Infiniti is 2 or 3 years old, and it has not been getting the brake components serviced. A pad can easily get wedged in the caliper, or a caliper pin can seize through lack of lubrication or moisture getting in. The result in both cases is that one of the two pads on one side will stick and wear prematurely. The other pads are fine, but because they need to wear evenly to provide optimum braking, you end up having to buy a new set of pads and change them on both sides.
It also occurs to me that if you do not drive very often and the car sits for long periods corrosion builds up that needs to be scraped off, and I think in such situations it messes the pads up over time.
In the past rear brakes lasted longer than front ones, but with power-assisted braking and brake force distribution, the rear brakes on a vehicle like your Infiniti do more work than they would on a vehicle without such features.
Another question to ask on the driving style would be if driver uses left leg for brakes, that would explain a lot 
I am a left foot brake person and I have no idea why that makes a difference . I don’t ride the brake pedal or threat the brake pedal like a clutch .
Great, you do no ride the brakes in left-foot mode.
I see a lot of people around who do that, as when car accelerates and still has brake lights on… well, it tells it.
I assume some of the people who do that also question “why brakes have to be repaired that early”.
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Stop and go traffic can seriously shorten brake life. The pads get so hot the wear rate skyrockets. GM used to test brakes in LA traffic because the factory pads would barely last 12,000 miles in those conditions.
Add big-heavy SUV into the mix and voila, worn out brake pads.
I own R51 Pathfinder (old/boxy one), which is a father of QX50 in question.
Per CarFax maintenance records, the second owner was replacing brakes every 15-20K miles.
I’ve replaced them too, as rotors were very much warped, so far it lasted for around 10K miles and have a lot of pad materiel left.
Not sure if prior owner was a lead-right-foot or left-foot-braker, but it seems to correlate with driving habits.