jlee
Lifer
- Sep 12, 2001
- 48,517
- 223
- 106
Since god made me an honorary police officer.
Actually one would expect a normal Corolla to perform significantly worse than a police car when it comes to braking. Police cars are intended for hard and frequent braking. A Corolla is not. Remember that this is a cheap car for poor people. Everything is just barely enough to actually call it a car. This Corolla is Ford Tempo version 2.0
It also doesn't help that I'm driving on 16 inch steel (heavy) rims with 205/55r16 winter tires. These are full size winter tires and where they touch the road is much wider than the contact area for the stock all season tires. Overall weight is much higher, moment of inertia is much higher. Then on top of that I'm usually traveling around with at least one passenger.
The goal of engine braking is just to slow the car down a little bit. Remember that energy is exponential with speed. The energy difference going from 70mph to 60mph is much much larger than going from 10 to 0. Just dropping 1 gear on the highway can easily remove half of the car's energy before the brakes are applied.
That or I could be "that guy" who takes 3 miles to slow down in preparation for a turn off the highway. You bash your head against the steering wheel because it's rush hour, there's too much traffic coming in the other direction, so you can't pass me while I'm going half the speed limit![]()
Decelerating to an exit is not "hard" braking. Stop driving like a jackass and start driving normally and you might get more than two years out of a new car.
Stock brakes on my Forester were still usable after a day of twelve autocross runs, and the only time I had brake fade issues with my Corolla was when a caliper seized and was dragging the pad on the rotor. It was a lot older with a lot more miles than yours, too.
