hawke94

Are the TDI stock brake pads ceramic or semi-metallic? I have a 2016 Prestige with 47k and will need to change the rears soon. Front and rear have never squealed or left any brake dust so that makes me think they are ceramic. Stopping power is ok with good initial bite though I wish there was more in the latter stages. I was thinking of getting Zimmerman rotors and maybe stock pads.

BTW, I had Akebonos in a Q5 and didn’t like them. Less dust than stock but also less stopping power. They also needed to be warmed up which was not ideal in the Northeast.

uberwgn

If your wheels are generally clean, those are ceramic pads.

I've got "hybrid" (ceramic + semi-met blend) Raybestos and Bosch pads in two of our cars now. Better stopping performance than Akebono, but I still feel their formulations are too biased towards ceramic characteristics, which I'm not a fan of at all. Both the Bosch and Raybestos pads are VERY clean. People frequently mention EBC Red. I'll likely sample those too.

Centric has a semi-metallic pad that produces about 2/3 less dust than a traditional Euro pad. Stopping power/performance is what we'd hope for and expect. (The Centric part number starts with 104.xxxxxxx.)

hawke94

Thanks for the info. I thought Audi didn’t use ceramics. From others on the forum, it sounds like they have semi-metallic based on brake dust and initial bite. Is it possible Audi started using ceramics with the C7.5?

uberwgn

They most certainly are fitting ceramic pads to cars sent to the USA. My '11 A4 had them as did our '15 Q5. I'm sure they are expanding across the product line. I don't know of any other method of keeping the black dust away. Again, this applies to the smaller engine/lo performance variants of a given model.

bpd

My '17 A6 3.0 dusted real bad when it was new. But after several hundred miles, the dusting stopped. I can only think it was break in period that did the heavy dusting, then it stopped. I was about to replace the oem pads, but the dusting stopped.