using the parking brake

[grease]

Originally Posted by average joe

The parking brake is an utter and complete waste of f-in time! I have had a half dozen cars with automatic transmission in my life, have driven them to and from Florida and NY numerous times, have NEVER set a parking brake my entire life, and have NEVER had one single problem with the damn car rolling away!

I dont care WHAT the GD manual says, its just one more friggin' thing that can break if you use it, when there is NO reason to bother doing so!

Troll...
10char

[Accumulator]

Heh heh, recently Accumulatorette used hers on the A8 for the first time in forever when she parked on a steep incline at our Audi dealer....good place to do it as something broke and it ended up costing a fair bit to get sorted out.

As for never using it/not caring if it works...doesn't anybody do parking brake turns any more?

[adjulian]

Use it all the time in my manual transmission regardless of whether or not I'm on slope or not.

[rmzalbar]

There's a chance that heavily-used HOT drum brakes (many cars still use them on the rear) could be warped out-of-round as they cool around the pressure of a strongly-applied parking brake.

No need to set them with 1,000,000 lbs of force, firm is enough.

You should still turn your wheels in on hills in case the parking brake cable snaps.

[Lowejackson]

Maybe I am missing something or it is a cultural difference but I am not sure why someone would not want to use the parking brake

[Accumulator]

Lowejackson- I don't usually use mine on the automatic trans cars as I don't believe it serves any real (necessary) purpose; the auto trans can hold the vehicle just fine in the cars we have now.

If I'm on a steep incline, or of course driving a stick, that's different!

[Lowejackson]

Accumulator, good point about automatic cars, my mindset tends to still think about most cars using a manual gear change. I park my car in 1st gear and use the parking (handbrake) brake but until I read this thread it had not occurred to me that people did not use the parking brake

[Accumulator]

Lowejackson- Heh heh, I understand completely. Guess I've turned some kind of corner now that I think primarily in terms of automatic transmissions Gee, who woulda thunk it!

I will grant that in the past there were automatics where everything relied on a small pawl/pin and these suffered failures, so back then it was wise to also use the parking brake.

Guess it's a toss-up these days, but if you're gonna use it, you gotta *use* it so it stays functional; had my wife had her parking brake problem anyplace except in the dealership's parking lot it woulda been a *big* problem indeed!