Premature rear brake pad wear at 24k?

Sorry to hear you all suffering these problems. As a contrast I've only just had my fronts changed on my 48k service and dealer reported rears still at approx 50% remaining.
At least you know not all cars are the same

(15-10-2014 03:01pm)m_101 Wrote:  I had the same experience at around 22k... Vinny, was the dealer Pentland by any chance? Cost me about £240 to get my rear pads changed. ouch!

Yip Pentland Cupar,said they were down below 2mm and wouldn't last till next service,as I was working away at the time and the wife took the car in so had her worried.
Bet if it was me who took it in they would of been fine?

Hi, I am new to babyRR.com, but I have just had my Evoque back from its 2nd service and they told me my rear brake pads are at 4mm, and will need changing soon, but I have only just done 20,000 miles!!
Not happy if I have to pay and get new rear pads fitted this soon, if this is a common fault with RRE.
I would be interested to hear if anyone else had same problem recently and what action they took...

So, this was the reply from LRCS:

Thank you for your email dated 16th October 2014.

With reference to your brakes enquiry, It has been confirmed by our Retailer that at 23,000 miles this is not unusual. When the vehicle is serviced we have to carry out a number of checks to comply with the warranty requirements.

I have also spoken to ... at our Retailer Taggarts Glasgow and they are now aware of you dissatisfaction of service which you received and will contact you once she has looked into this matter in more detail.

If you do require further assistance please do not hesititate to contact me.

Yours Sincerely

--



So er, a set of brakes wearing out at 23k miles is normal. Next they'll be telling me it's a "feature" of the vehicle or is "characteristic". Meaning that the same baloney happens to all of them!

Something to remember is these cars are 4WD, so if you're comparing your expected rear pad wear mileage to a previous 2WD car you are not comparing like for like. My 2WD drive car always replaces the rears because of corrosion rather than wear, however I'm sure other 4WD owners may say they don't suffer this.

And it's no excuse, as the rear Pads do seem to be wearing out faster than we would expect. They are smaller than the fronts but should hopefully have been designed with the correct relative braking requirement to the fronts, so maybe they got this wrong.

There is probably a dealer factor in here too, in that the dealers will have to advise you pads are low when about 4mm, that's effectively only just below half, but given they are servicing the car to be capable of going another year, they need to advise you they are getting low. Then it should be a customer decision as to if you would Prefer to do them now and effectively waste 40+% of the pad life, to have a year of un-hassled motoring, or be able to monitor yourself and bring it back when they get really low between services.

The difficulty of monitoring them yourself is of course it's easy to see the outer pads, but not so to see the Inner.

The other issue is gauging average wear rates, people's driving styles and usage of a vehicle is very different, some brake very hard others very light, some do all motorway, some will offroad, others may use their car a lot in winter with all the salt on the road, others may not, and so on. So it takes time to build up a trend of wear, to see if it's abnormal... but the dealers do seem to be seeing a lot of them worn out at 25000 and seem to think this is becoming normal.

The next problem that means this faster wear factor gets people annoyed is that dealers charge a ridiculous amount of money to change Pads, £280 for just rear pads is an example I've seen. On my other car this week I just Paid £350 to have ALL 4 Discs and 8 pads changed and have all the caliper sliders reworked, and note these were not cheap parts too! This job at a dealer would set you back £1000+ I reckon! And I expect they would have advised new calipers since the sliders were sticky... then make that £2000+... frankly madness, but people seem to pay it! when their independent local mechanic could do this job at a fraction of the price!

This though is not a LR problem but an industry problem... Something that worries me as cars become more complex and we are more reliant on dealers to even start to fix some more complex problems, this dealer hourly rate is simply Terrifying. Even my Dentist doesn't charge this much, and he is not cheap!!!

My Evoque rears have about 4mm left at 23000 miles... I'm a very light braker! I have my 3rd service next month, and expect them to advise me they are getting low. I will tell them 10mm - 4mm = 6mm wear, and at 3 years = 2mm per year, therefore at expected current mileage I will easily get another year, with 2mm of spare overhead... so maybe next year...!

For us owners it's not a nice customer experience, as the Evoque wears it's rear brakes out quickly... that seems to be becoming apparent.

But what can we do... well try your local mechanic, but next summer i'll be ordering my Pads from Duckworths and fitting them myself... I've tried the Service mode instructions on here and they work just nicely! Thanks Cutter7!

Phil, my local non-franchise LR specialist (they only look after Land Rover products and employ only Land Rover trained guys in the workshop) charge £35 an hour for labour. They use genuine LR parts too as they buy them from the dealer up the road. Reasons for the high cost isn't what the service personnel get paid, it's what the dealership has to charge to have their franchise up to LR standards with spotless workshops full of very high tech equipment to plug into our cars to tell them what might be wrong or that there is nothing wrong (more often!) but will still charge you an hour's labour for the privilege of being told they cannot find anything wrong in the log files.........

Hi Tim, exactly that's a much more sensible price!

It is the same story in Australia. My brakes only lasted to second service, the local dealer wanted over $2,000 AUD to do the disc and pads. I got a local mobile mechanic who specialises in LR products had he charged me less than quarter of the dealer prices. He said on he Disco's he can get two sets of pads from the discs. He did not change my discs, he said there was only a slight lip.