I recently purchased a 2011 Honda civic ex coupe in Feb 2013 w/ 17,000 miles on it. I just took it to the dealer for my first service in July. I was told by the service advisor that the brake pads will need to be repaced in 10,000 miles the brake pads are at 6mm at inspection. Is this a little premature or is this a typical for this car when i reach 30,000 mile on the odometer.
Thanks, Jack
The amount of wear on a set of brake pads depends to a very great extent on who has driven the car, and how he/she drove it.
If somebody does a lot of local stop & go driving, and/or if they do a lot of tailgating (which inevitably results in more use of the brake), and/or if they habitually ride the brake, and/or if they fail to shift to a lower gear on long downgrades, it is very possible to wear brake pads out in 30k miles.
Even if the OP does not drive as described above, it is very possible that the car’s previous owner drove in such a way that the brake pads experienced a lot of accelerated wear.
I can wear out a set of pads in 10k miles IF I drive like a maniac. But drive under normal conditions…and they usually last me 40k miles on my 4runner. And about 70k miles on my wifes Lexus.
30K is not unheard-of for front pads on a Japanese FWD compact. You could do better, like 40, with better driving habits.
“30K is not unheard-of for front pads on a Japanese FWD compact”
And 12k was not unheard-of for GM’s H-body compacts of the 1974-79 era!
Specifically, the Olds Starfire, Buick Skyhawk, Pontiac Sunbird, and Chevy Monza clones of that era were notorious for two things:
The brakes were incredibly undersized, especially if somebody paid extra for the optional, heavy V-8 engine.
The V-8 had to be hoisted off of its mounts in order to replace the two rear-most spark plugs on the right side of the car.
When most folks learned about the extra cost of tune-ups, due to the inept design of these cars, they opted to ignore the necessity of spark plug replacement on all cylinders, and only replaced six of the eight plugs. This led to a very early demise for most of these little rust-traps when they began to not start, and to run really badly, but there was a bonus in that early death, as it limited the number of times that the owners had to reline those undersized brakes.
Seriously, 6 mm? I would not replace those pads.
I recently replaced the front pads on my 04 Accord. They were the original pads and had 210,000 miles. Honda OEM pads generally last quite a long time. The ones I took out still had 3.5-4.0 mm, but it was getting close to the indicator (the little metal piece that scapes the disk when the pad gets low).