Depends on the car and the driving conditions. I drove the Saturn mostly for my 100 mile daily commute that had about 11 stops each way. The high performance brakes only lasted 35k under those circumstances where the OEM lasted 140k
@Mustangman, brakes don’t stop the vehicle. Tires stop the vehicle, brakes stop the tires. It’s all about balance. Grippier tires need larger brakes, but larger brakes are wasted on tires that aren’t so grippy.
Not necessarily, to both. If your car stops fine now, and you get grippier tires, you don’t need to upgrade the brakes.
And as has been mentioned, larger brakes are better at managing heat. Even if you’re on old, bald tires that lock up far too soon, if you do extended braking sessions, such as driving down a mountain, you can overheat the brakes without ever getting close to locking the tires.
When I put my MR2 on track at Road America, even though the brakes are fully capable of it, I never lock the tires. Ever. But the stock brakes would fade halfway through the second lap, and if I didn’t slow down to let them cool, the pedal would get soft not long after. Upgrading the brakes improved things dramatically, though I still can’t run full out for dozens of laps like the race cars can, mainly because I’m not running race pads because they don’t work well on the street (since they never get up to temperature).
I learned about brake fade just going down a ~ 1 mi hill into Ithaca that has a 25MPH speed limit. The old Oldsmobile my parents had was heavy and if you rode the brakes down, it was iffy when you got to the stop sign at the bottom if the car would want to stop. It’s what taught me to use a lower gear to hold speeds and minimize the brakes going down a hill.
That’s why it scares me when I see posts on reddit about not using a CVT to hold a speed down a hill, and instead “use the brakes” as “they’re designed for that and cheaper to change pads than a transmission”. Of course, holding the speed gets conflated with engine braking, and there’s still lots of internet warriors who claim to know more than the car’s manual so you see a lot of that. Anyway, the brakes aren’t cheaper than paying for an accident where you can’t stop because you rode your brakes down the hill to “save your CVT”.
I went down that Volcano on a bicycle. It’s something like 34 miles (by road) from the top (where there was some sort of government research station) to the bottom. The bikes we took had what looked to be motorcycle brakes, they were on the axle of the each wheel.
Where I grew up, sights like this were common. And more often than not, if you passed by when someone had used it, it’d be a car, not a semi, up there because some tourist had been riding his brakes all the way down the mountain. The locals knew better.
I still disagree. larger brakes are not just about torque, they are about management of the thermal energy.
It doesn’t hurt a CVT to downshift to a lower range. Use your CVT.
My CVT has only one lower “gear” and that revs pretty high. I’d have to check, but I don’t think I could go over 40 MPH downhill in this “L” gear. Manual is vague.
Which brings up an interesting point. The rev limiter can’t work when the engine is forced to move faster than the RPM limit due to downhill travel, can it? What happens?
15 forester
I’d think the computer would keep that from happening, change the CVT setting.
possible. I’m not about to drive down Pike’s Peak to test that.
I don’t know about Forester’ CVT, but in my 2012 Altima when I go downhill - it will automatically engage “descent mode”, where it will adjust CVT ratio to keep speed steady, which results in motor revving up. You touch the gas - it will let go, until you stop pushing the gas and it will follow next “set speed”. It is not 100% accurate, but is more or less OK when riding over Blue Ridge mountains close to where I live. I do not need to use brakes… only sparingly.
I noticed that my 2014 Legacy does the same thing, just not enough so I use the paddle shifter to get into a lower range if I need to slow down for a curve or something.
With my 2015 Legacy and now my 2018 Outback, I have eyesight so the adaptive cruse control. That means it also holds the speed down a hill, and pretty effectively. I just set what speed I want and it sets the CVT to the exact ratio to pretty much hold that speed, only using brakes if required and that’s pretty rare.
