2004 Passat and VW complaint

Notice a lot of brake dust on the rear wheels? The rear brake pads are a soft composition from the factory to reduce squealing. Replace them with a set of Mintex (red box) and you'll get a lot more miles out of the next set.

miles. Believing that it might be a warranty item I

warped - I suspected that. He then told me that while

pads were down 75%. This seems like an awful lot of

front brakes - seems odd - and only 24,000 miles. I

e-mail me!

late model VWs use soft pads for less noise and also the rear brakes tend to be biased a lot more than the front ones (odd, yes, but seems to be the trend).

it's normal, but annoying. Try a different brand (probably means non-dealer) of pad.

Nothing to do with the quality of modern pads/rotors or ABS with this car. Braking in the B5 and B5.5 Passats is biased to the rear, this causes the rear pads to wear faster than the front. I agree with the OP, this is odd, but other have reported the same thing. Also appears that the pad material is thinner on the rear pads than the front.

Does this make you wonder why VW engineering had the bright idea to put a "wear sensor" and dash warning light on the front pads only?

On the warped rear rotors, this too is a common occurrence on these cars. Happened on my '03 with 19K miles. I suggest you call VWOA and complain, and let them know you know that this is a well-known problem with this model. There was a time earlier when VW would cover this under warranty.

FYI, there is a great board for Passat owners at:

where you can search and read about what others have experienced with this car (but, a warning, it might scare you a bit).

I suspect the reason for 'wear sensors' on the front is that your front brakes are much more important to you than your rear brakes. If you somehow lost your rear brakes totally you would still be well able to stop the car; however if you lost your front brakes entirely the rear brakes cannot perform very well alone.

Have you noticed that the nose of a car dips down when braking? This means that down force is being added to the front of the car and really helps the front tires gain traction. At the same time, weight is coming off the rear wheels which greatly reduces the braking potential of the rear wheels.

by the way, my 01 Passat had 'warped' rotors at about 20k miles. I bought the car used and I noticed the problem during the test drive. I negotiated the replacement of the parts with the purchase. I now have

I suggest you put some pressure on your dealer (or VW) to replace these parts without charge to you. This is not normal brake wear. What it could be is that the original rotor was not running true. I do not know of course why it wasn't straight but it seems reasonable to assume that the rotor itself was made incorrectly. If it had side-to-side (axial) runout then it would wobble and strike the brake pad intermittently. These strikes create thin areas on the rotor and you have a rotor that varies from thick to thin around the circumference. This thick - thin shape is what causes the pulsing or vibrating braking action.

This is my hypotheses and it is based on some first-hand experience with my '95 passat earlier this year.

good luck!

C_S wrote:

Well, that oddity probably could be easily explained.

Earlier, say 20 years ago, the car designers simply had no other choice, but to divide the braking force by some 80% to the front and remaining 20% to the rear, for the safety reasons. As the rear wheels simply _should_not_ lock up earlier as fronts, no matter what. So, you sacrifice some braking force, but stay stable on the road instead.

Then came ABS and ESP. This means, the engineers could suddenly detect the precise point when the wheels start to lock up and then make ABS do something against it. Thus, they can use the rear brakes more. Which I suppose they did. As a consequence - the pads and discs wear faster.

Because it was always like this. It's a tradition :) And the rears are not as important as fronts.