Common Brake Problems and Maintenance

Your brakes are easily one of the most important components of your car. Having well-maintained and effective brakes will go a long way towards keeping you safe on the road! Few things are more terrifying than jamming on the brakes in an emergency and finding they don’t work. Before reading further, it may be helpful [...]

HOW DO BRAKES WORK? Part 3 – Power Brakes and Antilock Brakes

Power Brakes While drum brakes provide some additional power assist, as we saw in the discussion in Part 2 of this series, disc brakes don’t. In most cars with disc brakes, additional force multiplication is needed in order to make the brakes effective and easy to operate. This power is provided by the vacuum booster; [...]

HOW DO BRAKES WORK? – Part 2: Disc Brakes and Drum Brakes

Disc Brakes While there are several different kinds of disc brakes, the most common is the single-piston floating caliper. You’ll see what this means in a minute. This kind of brake has three main components: the brake pads, the caliper, and the rotor. (See figure 8.)   Figure 8: a disc brake The brake pads [...]

HOW DO BRAKES WORK? Part 1 – Braking Basics

Braking seems fairly simple: you press a pedal and the car stops. If you’re like me, you never really thought twice about how a small motion in your foot can stop an entire car. However, braking systems are elegant, ingenious, and complicated systems. With the help of a few basic principles of physics, the smallest [...]

Accident Liability: Who Is At Fault?

Now that I’ve discussed what to do if you’re in an accident, it makes sense to look at what happens after an accident. Car accidents can be very costly, both in terms of personal injuries and damage to your car. Understanding how insurance companies determine fault and what you are legally liable for can help [...]