[Efthreeoh]

Originally Posted by fazman

Take it to any shop which will do a free tire rotation for you or a free vehicle inspection for you. Have them take off the wheels and measure the brake pad thickness or just have you come over and look at the pads where they touch the rotor (from the outside and from the inside of the rotor).

some places that come to mind that will do this:
1) Firestone
2) Pepboys
3) Big Brand Tire

Any place that you take your car to get it's oil change can also provide this service for you too since they already have the car up on a lift.

Just because the the CBS tells you it is low "mileage" doesn't mean it is accurate. On my second set of pads/rotors for my n54... with BMW rotors/pads/sensor from Tischer... my front brakes were saying I had 7600 miles remaining when I was at 107k miles on the clock. I just changed my pads and rotors when it was showing me I had 1800 miles remaining a couple days ago (I'm at 162,000 miles when I did it). I probably could have gone another 10,000 miles on the 2mm/3mm of pad remaining but I don't want to cut it that close.

morale of the story, the CBS is nice as a dummy reminder... but the only real way to check your brakes is to pull off the wheel and visually look at the pad itself. remember, there is only ONE sensor for the front wheels and it only measures the depth of ONE side of ONE wheel as opposed to the TWO actual wheels with TWO sides of pads on each wheel. The sensor is making some assumptions that the other 3 pads are "about" the same.

My experience with the three sets of brakes I've done on my car is the system is pretty accurate regarding the remaining mileage estimate. I do drive my car very consistently, which helps with the accuracy of the prediction.