Ray: If all you're interested in is maximum stopping power, you probably want some performance street semi-metallic pads, James. And it's good that you don't care about noise or brake dust, because you'll get plenty of both. You'll also run through rotors pretty quickly.
Here’s a brief history of the brake pad: Invented in the 1890s by Sir Francis Brakepad, the first pads were made of copper. They didn’t last very long, and buying all that copper took lots of money. So disc brakes didn’t catch on until more than half a century later.
By the time disc brakes came into wide use, pads were made largely out of asbestos. That was cheap, and soft enough to stop the car quietly. It also did a great job of dissipating heat - which is important so the brakes don’t overheat and boil your brake fluid. Unfortunately, all brakes create dust as they get used, and the dust thrown off by asbestos pads turned out to cause lung disease. So we dropped those.
Next came so-called organic brake pads. Those are the ones sold at Whole Foods, next to the kale.
Actually, organic brake pads are made these days with a variety of nonmetallic, nonasbestos materials, like synthetic fibers, glass and some unused Seattle Seahawks 2015 Super Bowl Champions T-shirts. Organic pads work pretty well, but they wear out quickly, and also make a mess of your wheels.
After that came semi-metallic brake pads. Those have flakes of bronze, iron and steel wool in them. They do particularly well at dissipating heat, and they last a long time. But they’re noisy and dusty, and they’re hard on the brake rotors.
So the current state of the art is ceramic. Pads made of ceramic compounds are quiet, they stop the car well, they’re embedded with pieces of copper to help them dissipate heat, they last a long time, they’re easy on the rotors and they produce a very-light-colored dust, which is much less noticeable.
Interestingly, the reason they’re quiet is because the noise they make is beyond the range of human hearing. I guess that explains why all the neighborhood dogs used to come running whenever my brother showed up. I had always assumed it was just so they could see what food he was storing in his beard.
Anyway, ceramic pads are what we recommend to our customers. But if all you care about is stopping power, a semi-metallic performance street pad by StopTech or Hawk probably is what you want, James.
Just make sure you upgrade your stereo at the same time to help cover up the brake noise.
Spare tires do have an expiration date
Dear Car Talk:
My 14-year-old Toyota RAV4 has a cover on the spare tire. I'd like to buy a bike rack that fastens onto the spare tire, but that would require removing the cover. I'm wondering if that will reduce the useful life of the tire. How useful is a 14-year-old spare tire? The new RAV4 models don't seem to have a spare tire at all. What do you think I should do? - Gordon
Ray: That 14-year-old spare tire probably is pretty useless at this point.
Actually, let me correct that: The thing a 14-year-old spare tire is best for probably is holding a bike rack.
I’m guessing no one has looked at that spare tire in about … oh, 14 years. It’s not on most people’s to-do list: “Let’s see … quart of milk, call Mom, remove spare-tire cover and examine spare for sidewall cracks …”
So, you should have your mechanic give it a once-over. If he tells you it’s dried out and cracked and no longer viable, then it needs to be replaced anyway. (That’s probably what he’ll tell you.)
If, by some miracle, your spare tire has found the fountain of vulcanized youth under that cover, then you can keep it a little longer.
A cover probably does increase the useful life of a spare tire somewhat by keeping it out of direct sunlight. But even exposed to direct sunlight, a new spare will last at least six years, maybe longer - by which time the car will either be dead, and you won’t need the bike rack because the bike will be your only remaining vehicle, or you’ll have to buy another spare tire for $75.
So, my advice would be to replace the spare, stash the cover, get the bike rack and figure that the health benefits of more bike riding will more than make up for the 12 and a half bucks a year the new tire will cost you.
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