Whilst away on holiday, I had a warning message flag up, saying to check brake linings, which rather surprised me, but when we returned home last week, I checked through my records to see when the brakes were last looked at. A quick look through the alloy wheels seemed to show a reasonable amount of meat still on the front pads. It turns out that I replaced the front pads this time last year, and the rear pads were renewed last November, since last June I have barely covered 8,000 miles, and my previous 5 series cars' brake pads have lasted 20 - 30,000 miles. I haven't had the wheels off yet, but can anyone tell me what sort of pad life I should expect with an X5, as I would have thought 8,000 miles was quite short - I appreciate that it is a heavy car, but I don't drive it hard, and don't hammer the brakes all the time either,
Best to check the physical pad thickness, make sure it is not some spurious warning, before you get too concerned. Peter
when you replaced the pads did you fit new pad wear sensors and was the system reset to say that new pads had been fitted?
Thanks Peter, I will indeed check the pads before panicking! Mach1 - no I didn't fit new sensors, being a skinflint, I refitted the old ones! I didn't think there was a reset on the older models like mine, so no that wasn't done either!! I should add that the brakes work fine, and no 'orrible noises when braking to suggest any sort of metal to metal contact! From what I could see of the outer pads, there is plenty of meat left, but what the inside pads are like, I wont know until I take the wheels off! Rich
Brake pads are similar in many ways to tyres: friction coefficient when hot, cold, dry, wet; wear rate; noise. There're other parameters of course, for example how does tyre behave near it's limit. With brake pads, it can be what the initial bite is and how does it vary, is the pressure required linear, and for some how prone to fade the pad is during heavy use (track days and mountain abuse). The usual trade off for both tyres and brakes is that increased "performance" equals increased wear rate, and increased cost-per-mile. So to answer your question. Pad life? It depends.
I don't quite understand why you posted that Highsided, perhaps if you re -read my original post, you will see that I made a point of saying that I don't drive hard, and that previous 5 Series cars I have had, have enjoyed excellent brake pad life, and having fitted the same make pads on the X5 as I used before, I had assumed that I might get reasonable life from them. I actually asked the question of what length of life other X5 owners got from their brake pads, meaning, that if several people said they only get 10,000 miles from a set of front pads, then that is likely to be what I could expect myself, but so far no-one has come back with any pad life they have experienced. I take your point about it "depends", and of course it depends on how the car is driven to a very large extent, if you drive the car like a loony with heavy braking all the time, of course the tyres and brakes wont last long - neither will the suspension parts!! The pad life I got from the 5 Series cars was excellent in my view, and surprising considering all of them were autos too, and not exactly lightweight cars either. I have had quite a number of cars in the past, and many of them got through a set of pads in around 10 - 12,000 miles, so when I started getting 25,000 from the 5 Series cars, I was amazed - and highly delighted, not that the pads are that expensive - or at least they aren't if you avoid them in a BMW badged box!!
