[greglindahl]

Personally, I prefer that high-powered cars don't have great brakes; people who use the brakes that much are bad drivers.

I saw a talk from the data guy at Progressive car insurance, he said that the only signal from their "black box" monitoring of drivers (opt-in) which predicted accidents was extreme braking. Not strong acceleration, not anything else.

[ahartmetz]

...and that shows why high quality brakes don't usually change driving behavior. Go ahead and test the quality of the brakes in your car. Nobody brakes remotely like that outside of a racetrack. It feels (at least to me) like something is happening that shouldn't be happening, so you don't get the crazy idea to rely on it in your driving. The braking power of modern cars is in the range of 600 hp when braking from 100 km/h to zero.

That said, my driving instructor said "if you use your brakes on the autobahn in normal driving, you are doing it wrong". That is because you can see far and air resistance slows you down quickly enough.

[funnelsgun]

Eh? Under what circumstances could worse brakes be better?

High performance sedans, such as the Model S and F10 M5 don’t just need big brakes because of their speed, but also their weight.

2 piston calipers up front on either of those cars would be dangerous. What happens if the driver has to make a sudden stop? For this reason sedans and SUVs tend to have at least 4 piston calipers up front, 6 for performance models.

Never have I thought for a second, on road or on track, “Gosh.. I wish I had crappier brakes”.