Types of Car Brake System

HISTORY AND BACKGROUND

In a little over hundred years since automobile took hold of most people’s imagination, technologies design to make acceleration faster and reaching higher speeds have evolved. Despite charges, turbo charges, twin turbo charges or NOX, there are limits, which cannot be greater by land-based vehicle in terms of speed. Not the same can be said about the rather unseen parts of the automotive evolution. The only limitation to them is in connection with the human body ‘s ability to withstand rapid decelerations. It would be a lot easier to stop a car then to make it go faster otherwise. Whether they come in form of drum brakes or as disk, the brakes have been the horsepower’s companions throughout decades, each pulling evolution in different directions.

All cars need a brake system therefore it has been present since the invention of the automobile. It is important to understand the braking problems associated with braking in the past, and the advancements that have been made to overcome the problems. One of the first ever type brake was a very crude system used even before the Roman Empire. This simply involved a brake lever that pressed a wooden block against the wheel in order to slow a cart down by friction. Almost 2000 years went by with no development or changes to this technology, the lever and block was still prevalent. The block against wheel system is still used today, mostly in combination with the disk brake. That was where the disk brake originated from, that idea of braking.

In the early stages of the automobile, drum brakes was the standard as it offered several advantages over several other brakes. One was that the drum brake could keep out water and dust and materials that could damage the d...

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... as the brake housing. The disks spread apart, creating friction against the inner drum surface. Chrysler was also self-energized, making it more efficient. This was accomplished by inserting small balls set into round holes leading to the brake surface. But that was highly expensive and because of the expense, it wasn’t available to all consumers. The reliable caliper-type disc brake, developed in UK by Dunlop first appeared in 1953 on racecars. Most racing cars from then on continued using this braking system, but the first production car to have disc brakes on all four wheels was the Austin-Healy 100S in 1954. British companies then started to market this braking system, then went on to the Germans and then to the Americans. Discs have now become the common form for passenger vehicles and the disc break became applicable to almost all types of cars since then.