Does the emergency brake on your car no longer work after having fresh brakes installed? This is a fairly common problem that we have noticed happening in a few instances.
Put simply, your new brake rotors may be larger than your old brake rotors. While the overall diameter of the rotors might be the same, the inner diameter that your parking brake touches is likely now larger than the original brake rotor diameter, so when your parking brake is pulled, there is nothing for the parking brake shoe to contact.
For example, after checking the brake rotors on this BMW 328i we noticed that they were brand new and were in fact the correct part number for this vehicle. However, with that in mind, the inner diameters of the new versus old rotors were in fact different sizes.
On your brakes there are parking brake shoes that expand and touch your brake rotors when your parking brake is pulled. When the brake shoes expand, they touch the rotors and create resistance which ensures that that vehicle will not roll.
If your Parking Brake no longer works after new brakes were installed, this can likely be a result of the new rotors being too large so that the parking brake shoes are not contacting the brake rotors when you pull your E-Brake.
Checkout our quick video explanation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBqIiFR10I0
Are you experiencing issues with the brakes on your car? We will inspect them for free as part of our standard free vehicle health inspection! 🙂 Give us a call or shoot us a text at (760)721-5500 today!