Front pad failure

[tarapoochy]

Hi all,

Has anyone else come across a failure of the front pads on the Jaguar XF? (X260 although I believe the X250 saloon has the same brakes)

My car is less than 3 years old and the “Brake pad low” warning kept popping up last week. We were going away on holiday the next day and I couldn’t find anywhere to fix it so decided to take a look myself to check if there was enough pad material left for our travels. It all looked OK, about 4mm on the rears and 7mm on the front, but I decided to get the wheels off and check the sensor wires. On removing the front left (where the sensor wire for the front axle is) I was horrified to find the sensor wire dangling loose and half the inboard pad material protruding from the calliper! When I dismantled it I found that the pad material was completely separated from the metal back plate. Only about half of the material was left, wedged in at a jaunty angle with a couple of other small bits. Obviously when the pad material broke away it took out the sensor wire. It is probably a good thing that it seems to have damaged the sensor so I got the intermittent warning, otherwise I might not have known. Amazingly the brakes seemed to work fine! My car was bought from a Jaguar dealer at only 9000 miles so I took the old pads to my dealer and compared them to Jaguar originals just to prove to myself that they were the original pads - they definitely were. The dealer offered me the new ones but I declined the offer! Being a fan of EBC I managed to get a set along with the sensor that day and had it all back together for our holiday the next day. However, the worrying thing is that when I had a good look at the inner pad from the other side I could see the pad material was also delaminating from the metal back plate. The intact pads still had about 7mm of material, so were only just over half worn. Strangely it only seems to be the inner pad - the outer pads look fine. Unfortunately without removing the wheel it is almost impossible to see the inner pad.

I am about to send the pads off to Jaguar to see what they have to say and am also contemplating contacting Trading Standards as if other cars are like this it could be a serious safety issue. I dread to think what might have happened if the last bit of pad material had dropped out while I had been towing our caravan the next day!

Have I been unlucky or has anyone else seen this fault?

[RichardSEL]

EBC Red Stuff will generate more dust initially especially on an already used disc
But they are reported (from my time with a much tweaked 2.0L tFSI Passat) noticeably sharper to OEM pads apart from a tendancy to squeal when hot if you're enjoying your driving
They consequently have a lower life -- 30k is about the max the Golf GTI boyz reported in forum then (about two years ago)

[rosemary]

Hello tarap00chy

See my post on 30th Aug 2015 Brake Dust on Alloys, the same thing happened to my XF
Dave.

[rosemary]