Tested: EBC Brakes Long Term Review

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Best of all, we had zero issues driving through mixed snow AND mud.  Honda's brilliant Realtime 4WD kept us moving forward and our EBC brakes stopped us when we decided we had had enough.

 

The Final Verdict

At 10,000 miles of use, our EBC URS rotors still looked great.  The Greenstuff pads were still in great shape as well, with plenty of material left.  The only sign of use was some light marks on the rotor face, which is completely normal.

 

With just over a year and 10,000 miles on our EBC brakes, we installed some new KYB struts and snapped a quick pic with our cellphone (sorry for the low quality).  You can see the rotor only shows minor scuffing and while all of the anti-corrosion coating is gone, the rotor still looks great.  We forgot to take a picture of the pads themselves, but they also showed plenty of life.

Just as we had put 35,000 miles on the brakes we noticed a metallic sounding squeal coming from the front of the CR-V.  After ruling out a wheel bearing, we pulled the wheels and noticed the inner passenger brake pad had worn down to near the backing plate.  It was time to remove our trusty EBC brakes and replace them with something newer.  After having zero brake related problems and with such a high opinion of our EBC brakes, one would think we would install the same package again, right?

 

Wrong!

Sadly we had to go to the bargain basement brakes we avoided on the first install.  The simple explanation is time: With brakes that were becoming dangerous we needed to get off of them ASAP and could not afford to wait a month for new pads and rotors to show up.  The worn out pad had also gouged the passenger side rotor and it would need to be machined if we were to reuse it (it's not really possible to the machine shop when you don't have any brakes!).  So off-brand parts it is…

 

There is still good news.  The fronts of the rotors are actually in quite good shape and with a bit of cleaning and a light sand would probably be perfectly fine.

 

Unfortunately on the back you can clearly see where the one worn out pad damaged our rotor and started creating a lip on the edge.  Had we caught this earlier we could have replaced just the pads and salvaged our rotors.

Overall we have been incredibly impressed with our EBC brake parts and would happily use them again.  EBC offers a lot of brake part options for cars that do not usually receive aftermarket support.  For a daily driver, it would seem EBC has the perfect solution for your braking needs.  Avoid getting gouged at the dealership and make your car safer at the same time.  Yes, the pad wear is a bit diappointing, but overall we think the tradeoff for performance was well worth the relatively low life we saw from the brakes.

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