Could driving with a parking brake on wear out the normal brakes?
You guys are freaking me out. I accidently drive with the parking brake on all the time and my brakes work fine. They were just inspected and there wasn’t a problem. Am I just freakishly lucky or is the danger to the brake pads overstated? The fact that the brakes didn’t work at the end of the journey suggests the pads were overheated. If you don’t overheat the pads, you just put a small percentage of extra wear on them. There is no need at all to panic if you do this. It is incredibly unlikely that doing this will boil your brake fluid. If the praking brake was on enough to generate enough heat to do that, then you’d very much notice that the car was behaving very oddly – hardly moving and needing full throttle to move it and the like. Putting a little heat in for a long period will cause the pads to ‘fade’ (surface overheating of the pad material). You need to put a huge amount of heat into the system in a short time to boil fluid. Modern cars have very, very good brake fluid. Boilin
