Brake pads for Uber work

Regular Toyota pads or any of this ceramic stuff everyone's buying should be a okay. Your brakes don't do that much work in a Prius believe it or not You should get 200,000 mi on a set of four-wheel discs they'll be down to the wear indicators by that time

 

Please describe this "weird, intermittent brake pedal pump or humming" more.

There is an electric pump in the system. It sounds a little like a rattlesnake, or a joy buzzer, and it normally runs once every few times you have braked, and does not run repeatedly while you're braking or while you're not braking, and you normally don't notice any change in the feel/operation of the brakes when it runs. It is there to maintain pressure in an accumulator, the pressure setpoints are always adequate to work the brakes, so there should be no change in brake feel that goes with the pump running.

If you are hearing the pump run more often than that, or if you are feeling brake action that changes when the pump runs, then you need one of these components replaced, and should probably avoid carrying passengers for hire until then. All the pads and rotors you want will be a band-aid over gangrene.

 

Rural mail carriers can destroy Prius brakes real fast... But every other type of driving they'll wear slower than most any car out there. I just replaced front pads and rotors on my daily driver at 288K miles. I know people on here that made it to 300K miles on original brake pads.

 

Probably a misguided thing to focus on. You should focus on stay in regen. When i did Uber i still rarely used mechanical brakes. Unfortunately, the regen brake is pretty soft. Takes a while to slow down.
Brake pad wise, if you keep the brakes serviced and drive like a hybrid should, brake pads should last 200k+

 

Best way to learn how to not use brakes is to wear them down so they're super noisy and then try to drive without noise. But you'll have to replace the rotors if you do it that way. I did it for a while and learned lots.

 

It doesn’t even occur to me, to do anything other than go to a dealership parts department.

 

Toyota brake pads are very well made by the given company that's making them at the time doesn't really matter they're selected well. So he can usually get a deal on them too at any given time.

 

Well let this thought occur to you: Replacing with lowest price ceramic pad and lowest price drilled and slotted rotors eliminated all my problems with OEM breaks that inconsistently grab and not as well or as steady. Huge upgrade to overall performance of my Prius as of three weeks ago! Also price was way, way lower than what they charge at the Stealership too.

 

I would not recommend drilled or slotted rotors as all they will do is shred your pads down quicker than a normal rotor.

I have the Brembo UV rotors and I paired them with Autozone Duralast Elite pads with lifetime warranty.

The only reason slotted or drilled rotors are needed are in racing applications with high performance vehicles at racing speeds.

You are really just getting less material to brake with and shreding your brake pads that have no warranty.

 

There's still this little-noticed but quite possibly important bit from the original post:

Because properly working Prius brakes aren't built to have any weird intermittent pedal pump inadequate feeling or frequent humming, there's a chance here that the OP is talking about a Prius with a failing brake actuator.

That deserves to be thought about, at least enough for the OP to say more about the humming and weird intermittent feeling.

There aren't any pads or rotors that will fix a failing actuator.

 

Got any references to prove your point? My experience has been the exact opposite... Braking performance has been dramatically improved with cheap ceramic pads and cheap drilled and slotted rotors. And yeah, there's plenty of people that claim that drilled and slotted rotors will warp more easily and while that makes sense if you're driving a big huge SUV in the moutains everyday and there's no regenerative braking... But that's not the Prius. We're talking about a car that can easily achieve 300K miles on original brake pads.

 

Yea, that makes sense... But when you get OEM pads to last 300K miles, the notion of replacement pads wearing down faster is not likely to be an issue in terms of the rest of lifespan of most Prius at that mileage level.

 

Our front pads are likely at 5mm by now; last check was 6mm, but that was just over 2 years and 7k kms back. We’re at 100k kms now. I wouldn’t want to go any lower than 3mm, which’ll be somewhere around 150k kms I’d think.

To make it (safely) to 300k miles on OEM pads, think you’d need to be doing a LOT of flatland highway driving.

I agree re price of pads though, the savings gambling on aftermarket are trivial.

 

Yeah it's all about the type of driving you do... A rural mail carrier would be luck to get to 100K miles in some cases.

 

The original equipment manufacturer Toyota uses for Pruis brakes is ADVICS.
You can buy them directly and avoid Toyota's markup from Rockauto.com.

 

With the usual caveats about which products sold by that manufacturer through other channels are spec-identical to the ones they sell to Toyota, etc.

 

What are we talking about, 5~10 bucks savings? Say every 5 years at most?