3rd Gen Concerns

Almost pulled the trigger on ordering a 2016. They look really nice but.....with them being new and the exchange rate, we will be paying prime for them here in Canada. So i went and baught a brand new trd sport dbl cab. I previously had a 2006 but this one rocks. Plus i got a total of $4500 off which makes this deal even better!!

 

Bad ass. I, too, need a bed however. If I didnt, this would be mine.

 

I haven't ruled out a good deal on the last of the 15s myself. Nice truck.

 

Thanks. I installed good year duratrac. Love them. The dealer took $2300 off plus a free bug deflector plus $2000 if i financed it myself. Pretty good deal. I think i made a good choice....

 

All modern vehicles have them because thats what consumers "think" they want.

Any car today is capable of locking up the tires in a braking event if the ABS is disabled. Including drum braked cars. Which goes to prove that having "extra" capability in a braking system is redundant and unneccessary. Braking distance and panic stopping capabilities are 100% dependent on your tires and how they match the road surface.

I'll give you 2 concessions. Disks brakes are easier to service and disk brakes dissipate heat better. But you will not overheat a light duty trucks brakes in any way unless you go WAY outside the owner's manual recommended operation. So mostly it comes down to servicing.

Semi trucks use 99.99999999% drum brakes. Drum brakes can handle anything a light duty truck can expect to do.

QFT

 

I like how people think that stopping distance is based on brake size or brake design as opposed to tire traction and abs effectiveness.

 

OMG! I Can't believe you are comparing semi truck brakes to a Tacoma. If drum brakes are so great then why aren't all the other manufactures using them.

 

OMG! I can't believe you didn't read the whole post.

Go back and reread the posts that quoted yours. the answer is already there.

 

The technology of drum brakes has not stopped advancing just because disc brakes became the "in" thing.
I see a lot of people bash the drums but offer no valid reasoning outside of "that's not how it's done anymore". I personally don't care. Rear brakes don't need to be changed often and it's a midsized truck so really, how are you going to overload them?

 

The 2015 Colorado weighs more than the 2015 Tacoma yet it stops quicker unloaded and has more braking power when towing a trailer. That's because it has disc brakes and seems like a nicely designed system too. We'll have to wait and see how the 2016 Tacoma performs in the braking department. Sure it'll be "good enough"..........but not as good as a Colorado. They're increasing the towing capacity but keeping the same sub par brakes. Good job Toyota.

 

You must not understand how rear brakes work. The rear brakes hardly do any braking unless they are running full time ABS and trying to get maximum brake power from rear. Rears cannot lock up at any brake input from the driver due to the danger of rears locking up. No manufacturer will allow the rear to lock up and plan the ABS to take care of it. The drum brakes on the Tacoma have more than enough power to lock up. Disk brakes will also lock up, so there is no difference.

There is very little weight bias on the rear wheels in a street truck. The brake ratio is set very low to the rear. Maybe the Colorado is heavier in the rear compared to its total weight so it brakes better.

Strong rear brakes total vehicles and kill people

 

I doubt drum breaks are causing issues with the Toyota stopping distance where it is causing saffey problems. Someone noted that semi's have drums. If disc breaks were so good underload that wouldn't be the case.

I also feel like many Toyotas have "loose brakes". You just adjust driving habits.
Heck, you may have to change out the front brakes in the CO more often because of a more aggressive stop. So could be a bad thing.
Again I doubt it causes a safety problem and is much to gripe over.

I'm much more upset about no power seats.

 

Discs are better.
Semis have drums because they are much cheaper at the purchase time.

 

Semis also have drums because they are more durable. Heavy trucks discs can handle more heat but once they hit a certain threshold they usually crack which is a total, and very expensive, failure.

 

When Trucks first started getting ABS it was in the rear brakes only for a few years.

 

ABS doesn't work anyways so doesn't matter.

 

wrong. If it indeed stops quicker it's because it's got a stickier tread compound in the tires. Basic physics. Either truck can lock the tires up. It has nothing to do with disk brakes any more than it stops quicker because it has a better color selection.

Most people don't know how hard they can/have to step on the brake pedal to get full effect out of the FRONT brakes. Once they hear the ABS pumping the rear because the rears are locking up due to weight transfer, they stop pressing further on the brakes when the front brakes (AND TIRES) are far from maximum braking and lockup. Front and rear hydraulic circuits are separated hydraulically, but applied mechanicaly at the same rate through the brake pushrod..

 

In single panic stop tests a vehicle is limited by the tires, not the brakes. As many have stated, all modern braking systems can lock all four wheels easily. So the fastest way to stop is to apply enough braking pressure to almost-but-not-quite lock the wheels. The point at which the wheels lock depends entirely on the tire (and road conditions). It could also depend on how sensitive and responsive the ABS system is but I suspect they're all the same these days.

The very design of the Tacoma marginalizes rear brakes. Trucks already have a front weight bias. Braking causes a vehicle to pitch forward. The nosedive is caused because braking force is applied at the tires contact patch which is at the bottom of the vehicle. The direction of force does not line up with center of gravity so it induces a torque, the front end goes down and the rear end goes up. The amount of torque increases as the distance between the force and the center of gravity is increased. Thus higher center of gravity vehicles, like trucks, have a worse forward pitch. If your suspension is stiff enough you may not experience a nose dive, but the forces are still being applied.

The pitch forward increases the load on the front axle while decreasing it on the rear, making the front brakes more important and the rears less. This magnifies the already existing front weight bias. The best part is, the harder you brake the worse the pitch becomes and the less effective your rear brakes are. The problem is not that the rear brakes do not have enough breaking force, it is that they cannot exert anywhere near their maximum without locking the tires. You could take the brakes off a 747 and attach them to your rear wheels and you wouldn't stop any faster (ignoring the weight).

Having said that any braking system can easily lock up all 4 wheels, the difference between braking systems performance is in how much energy they can absorb before they start to fade and how long it takes to cool down. The amount of heat they can absorb depends mostly on the material and their physical size, not as much the shape. It is true that disc brakes cool faster than drums thanks to increased surface area and air flow, that is their primary advantage over drums. Due to the nature of the vehicle, the fronts have to do most of the work. And under most circumstances you simply cannot overheat the rears without melting the fronts first. The rears brakes are way oversized for the amount of work they typically do. The fact that it takes them longer to cool down doesn't come into play because they don't heat up in the first place.

Where the rear brakes matter on a light truck is when towing. But only if the trailer doesn't have it's own brakes. When the trailer's got brakes then the braking dynamics get more complicated, but the drums aren't the primary means of stopping the trailer. In the case where the trailer doesn't have brakes Tacoma's have a limit of 3500 lbs. In that case now you have the front brakes stopping the truck, and the rear brakes stopping the trailer. If you look at brakes for trailers you might notice that 10" drums are rated for a 3500lb trailer. Guess what size drums are on the Tacoma? In this situation you can still lock up all the tires so the difference between discs and drums is in how long it takes the rear brakes to cool down. Once you get to the point where your rear brakes are overheating, the front brakes will already be gone and no amount of well engineered discs will save you from your stupidity.

Still, even if discs on the rear won't get you to stop any faster, they certainly wouldn't increase the distance, right? True. You could put discs on the back and not lose any stopping distance. But you do lose something. The emergency/parking brake. Putting a parking brake on a disc brake system is not as straight forward as it is on a drum. A cable disc brake requires a lot of mechanical advantage to get a cable to shove the pad hard enough against the rotor to stop a vehicle that may have a trailer attached and sitting on an incline. It can be done, it's just more and more difficult as the vehicle gets heavier. The actuation of drum brakes with a cable is more straight forward, and they are self energizing so any movement of the drum makes the shoes bite harder into the friction surface. So if you need a strong parking brake anyway, and its easier to use a drum, just make it a little bigger and make it pull double duty as the rear brakes.

You don't need discs on the rear of a truck. On the front, discs are wonderful. And on other vehicles, 4 discs might matter. But on the the rear of a pickup truck, they are marginal. They don't do shit in daily driving with an empty or full bed because the high center of gravity causes the fronts do all the work. When towing the drums can and will effectively help stop a heavy load that doesn't have it's own brakes, and the time the system takes to cool down shouldn't be a primary concern. The drums are basically a parking brake that's been over sized to pull double duty when you've got a trailer. The rest of the time they're just along for the ride and can't help you stop if they wanted to.

If you prefer rear discs then that is a fine preference to have. Light duty trucks don't gain anything with rear discs, and they lose an easy parking brake mechanism.

 

+ infinity.

excellent writeup. Too bad logic, physics and science mean fuckall to some people. Which is why people think they want disks..lol.

 

What?? that makes no sense.

I can assure you as a CDL holder that if disk brakes provided ANY type of advantage the cost of purchase is irrelevant.

Now we're just making shit up out of the air, aren't we?

Passenger cars run hydraulics. Semi's run air pressure and mechanical arms. High performance passenger cars (race cars if you will) run disks because after miles and miles of constant full on braking, the whole brake system builds up enough heat to boil the hydraulic fluid. A PASSENGER CAR drum brake's hydraulic cylinder sitting inside the drum and backing plate does not dissipate heat quickly enough for racing events. (for the record you can boil the fluid in a race car with huge 4 wheel disks too. Ask me how I know that) For any combination of passenger car operation on public roads for any combination of towing and mountain driving, you will not build up enough heat to boil a drum brake cylinder, especially a rear.

Unless you never change your brake fluid. According to your maintenance manual.

Unless you ride your brakes going downhill. NOT according to your driver's manual.

Unless you tow shit way heavier than you're s'posed to. Not according to your drivers manual.

Unlesss you tow shit without trailer brakes like you're s'posed to. Not according to your drivers manual.

A semi doesn't have a hydraulic circuit and no fluid to boil. You can however have a loss in an air circuit. You can heat up the drums enough that they expand and wont contact the pads until they cool enough. As opposed to (SEE BELOW) a semi with disk brakes that warps the shit out of a disc and has a catastrophic failure of a disk on the side of the road. Fix that shit..

Yep.

Edit>>>
sarcasm alert.
Holy crap I just realized that I have to get rid of my 18' flatbed because the trailer brakes on it are drums. How substandard. I gotta get me a disk brake trailer brake axles.

Wait. I don't even think they make those.

End Edit.