dmmhelton

Hi all, my first post.

I have a 2008 S5 on which the brake wear indicator just came on. I've done enough research to know that there's a wear sensor on the LF pad, and the rear parking break function senses wear for the rear brakes. What I can't figure out is how to tell whether the front or rear brakes are triggering the indicator light? The rear pads look like they should be the culprits since they only have few millimeters left on them, and the front pads look like they still have a lot of meat on them. I am the 2nd owner and don't know if the fronts were already replaced, but I'm guessing they were.

Any way, is there a way to tell which brake is triggering the indicator light?

I do have a Ross Tech cable and S/W and searched the forums and tech articles there, but I did not find an answer. A scan does not show any fault codes and going into the parking brake module doesn't yield any obvious means to determine if it is triggering the light. Can anyone help?

Kueagle

Mine is 2013 S5 and has only the driver front sensor. No sensors in the rear brakes.

J. Patterson

You could jumper the front pad wear sensor at the connector to see if the warning goes away, but why not just change the rears if the are visibly thin? The electric parking brake monitors rear pad wear by measuring how far the parking brake actuator has traveled. VAG com or similar is required to retract the pads prior to removal. It’s a bit scary but not all that hard. Have not needed it yet on my S5 but I did it on an A6 that my wife had.

dmmhelton

Good idea about jumper to isolate which is triggering, thanks. I should have thought of that myself.

I plan on replacing rear brakes regardless, but fronts are bad (sensor/pad too low) I'd like to know that so I can order the everything at once.
I'm not afraid to do the rear brakes and use the vag retracting function. Seems pretty straight forward. However, hen I attempt to read the current pad thickness on module 53-10-06 per the last step in the process, I get an error msg ("Error Security Code Required"), so I'll have to research that.