Auto-Hold - Wear on brakes?

Soldato
Joined
31 Oct 2002
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Just wondering what the general opinion on auto-hold is? Does it cause extra wear on brakes? Or is this negligible and unlikely to need me to replace the brake pads/discs sooner?

A new car I've ordered has this feature and I've not used it before.

Thanks.
 
I wouldn't think so, there would be more wear when your discs are rotating. Probably more wear on the engine trying to push through the brakes. I've wondered this when using the brake hold feature on my Mercedes.

Something I only learned last week, after 3 years of owning the car, pressing the brake pedal again releases the auto hold which makes for smoother driving in slow moving traffic.
 
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Brakes only wear due to friction, and auto-hold generally only activates on stationary vehicles. There might be some friction now and then but it's negligible.
 
Worse is cars with fake LSD that uses rear brakes to mimic the effect. My Jag barely made it 15k miles iirc before recommending/ requiring pads and discs.
 
My Renault Scenic would go through rear brakes more than I thought was normal and I think it was the wear related to auto hold and when you take off again but it was a heavy car often loaded and used to tow, so perhaps normal, probably chnaged 3 times in 100k.

Worse is cars with fake LSD that uses rear brakes to mimic the effect. My Jag barely made it 15k miles iirc before recommending/ requiring pads and discs.

My Alfa 147 GTA had a bit of an issue with this, I use to warp discs every couple of months on my commute to work through the country lanes.....you can perhaps imagine how it was driven, brakes were underspecced for having to do the braking of a pretty quick car and all the faux LSD stuff, after about my 4th set of disc/pads Alfa upgraded the discs pads and calipers to accomodate 330mm from 305mm, no problems after that but yup the brakes got used a lot to maintain traction.
 
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Worse is cars with fake LSD that uses rear brakes to mimic the effect. My Jag barely made it 15k miles iirc before recommending/ requiring pads and discs.
good point - I thought torque vectoring using brakes was becoming more common with high torque ev's (tesla, id4), but, don't you feel(unpleasantly) that car is doing it and back off. ?
... I'd like to experience the bmw real e-diff which they seem to use in the i4
 
Last few cars have all had auto hold and I've not experienced any extra brake wear.

I do mostly city stop/start driving and honestly wouldn't consider a car without it in the future.
 
I've found auto-hold on my Focus to be very er.. grabby. I know it's just a Focus and it'll be cheap software or whatever, but there's an awful interaction between the brakes, dual-clutch gearbox, and auto-hold. If I'm slowing down to a stop, as I release the brakes slightly to smooth the stop, the car thinks I might want power/creep and so engages the clutch again, which makes it slightly juddery is it's only a 3-pot fighting against the brakes. But then, because I still am slowing slightly, the car decides I'm slow enough and the auto-hold grabs :D

In fairness, it might because I disable auto stop/start every time I get in the car and normally it kills the engine as I get below 5mph or something, and so it wouldn't normally be fighting a "live" clutch... but still.
 
I hated it on the Fiesta ST I had (that one was more for stopping on hills). It got disabled on day one. It would almost always release a split second to late so you'd get a jolt as you set off.
 
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Quoted for truth. Auto hold only engages once the vehicle has come to a complete standstill.

That's not exactly true. I've got a low mileage 72 plate with all the fancy modern tech but the auto hold engaged on it's own while I was driving yesterday and the car told me to stop driving immediately due to a brake failure. I had it taken to a main dealer and there was nothing wrong with the brakes. It was a technical fault with all the modern gadgetry that made the brakes lock on. I wish cars and motorbikes could go back to being as simple as they were in the 1980s...
 
That's not exactly true. I've got a low mileage 72 plate with all the fancy modern tech but the auto hold engaged on it's own while I was driving yesterday and the car told me to stop driving immediately due to a brake failure. I had it taken to a main dealer and there was nothing wrong with the brakes. It was a technical fault with all the modern gadgetry that made the brakes lock on. I wish cars and motorbikes could go back to being as simple as they were in the 1980s...
That sounds horrendous. Much like the "lane keeping assist" I had on a rental recently that consistently tried to pull me off the road into the grass verge at the same corner every day.

I can honestly see myself asking for a Dacia as my next company car because I value the simplicity! When I look back at cars like the e39 5 Series they just seem even more perfect to me now. Good specification where it counts and a focus on quality and the driving experience, no gimmicks, no NCAP tick box gadgets.

...and just to completely counter what I said above, I really like the auto hold feature on my Leon but I've never had it do anything other than work perfectly.
 
good point - I thought torque vectoring using brakes was becoming more common with high torque ev's (tesla, id4), but, don't you feel(unpleasantly) that car is doing it and back off. ?
... I'd like to experience the bmw real e-diff which they seem to use in the i4
It’s just stability control in most cases
 
I hated it on the Fiesta ST I had (that one was more for stopping on hills). It got disabled on day one. It would almost always release a split second to late so you'd get a jolt as you set off.

If it's a MK7 that was hill hold assist hence it dragging on the brakes. Newer systems are a lot better.
 
That sounds horrendous. Much like the "lane keeping assist" I had on a rental recently that consistently tried to pull me off the road into the grass verge at the same corner every day.

I can honestly see myself asking for a Dacia as my next company car because I value the simplicity! When I look back at cars like the e39 5 Series they just seem even more perfect to me now. Good specification where it counts and a focus on quality and the driving experience, no gimmicks, no NCAP tick box gadgets.

...and just to completely counter what I said above, I really like the auto hold feature on my Leon but I've never had it do anything other than work perfectly.

Another stupid one on new cars is the sign reading and auto speed limiters (which the EU is going to make mandatory and you won't be able to turn it off). They love to notice 30mph signs for side roads, when your on a NSL one.

Technology isn't supposed to make things worse :/
 
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That sounds horrendous.

I'm just glad I was in town on a quiet 30 mph road. It could've been tragic if I was doing 70 mph in the fast lane of a motorway. I really don't like all the electronic wizardry that controls cars these days.
 
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