Are the rear brake rotors on the Si (and other models) defective?

[DyM]

Folks,

I've got less than 10K miles on the "oh-doh" after hardly more than 6 months of ownership, and she's never seen a single track day. I glanced at my rear rotors this morning, and to my surprise they're developing some decent nail-catching grooves. The fronts are shiny and chrome like Fury Road, but the rears have more grooves than Austin Powers's iPod. I just passed my A1, though not at Honda. I have not hit B service yet, so as I understand it, nobody should have been messing with my brakes yet.

In poring through the available threads on civicx, the picture I get is that many other Civic owners (not just Si) are having the same problem, but noticing it at mileages about twice that of my car. I believe someone mentioned it may be a bad batch of rotors Honda got, and someone else suggested that lack of lubrication on the slides is the culprit. Either way, seems like owners are getting denied warranty service at the stealership for the usual "you didn't perform [insert code for any random service they feel like blaming it on, and then sometimes, on rainy Sundays, insert service #9 here]" and therefore have to dish out their own hard stolen greenbacks for the parts and labor.

My questions, if either a technician or a recovering survivor of this service could oblige:

1) For low-mileage cases specifically, do we have a concrete/traceable cause yet at this point?

B) Has anyone successfully been able to warranty their rear rotors?

Potato) I understand brakes and pads are not covered by the usual warranty, but is there a sequence of words/numbers/gestures (short of any legal remediation, which was also mentioned in the threads) I could verbalize to a Honda rep, that would dispense with the usual rigmarole? Encourage them to take a look at the issue from my perspective? I'm not very good at being lied to (I'm allergic, I just start laughing it's really bad) and I don't want to ruin the budding relationship, since they're right around the corner.... but I also don't want to Jesus out my other cheek for this because it's clearly not a case of equipment abuse. Also because of this car I'm poor af. Any suggestions for how to service the brakes in-house, without escalating to Honda?

I'm sorry, I can't count.

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[jakabony]

Following this. I noticed the grooves in my rear rotors as well. 7800 miles. No hard braking ever. No other issues.

 

[BogdanM]

Would be a useful to post an image of the disks thats because grooves on disk brakes isn’t unheard off and depending on the depth of them might not represent anything really.

 

[turbo dragon]

Will definitely be following this as I dont have this problem yet, only have 5oo miles on it now lol. On the plus side, if it does happen, it would be a great time to put a big brake kit on.

 

[jakabony]

Would be a useful to post an image of the disks thats because grooves on disk brakes isn’t unheard off and depending on the depth of them might not represent anything really.

I noticed it only on my driver's rear rotor. The passenger one appears fine.

 

[turbo dragon]

That doesnt look good at all.

 

[jakabony]

Yeah it is hard to say. I have seen rotors like that before. I don't notice any issue when braking or any noise. It's hard to say if something like that would be a warranty issue, or they need to cut them.

 

[Micah]

Over 15,000 miles on mine. I will have to take some pictures.

 

[erbee]

Check the lug nuts . My front rotor warped because tire shop air guned it to 300ft lb . I can jump all day on tire iron and it still won't come off.

Factory rear brake pad sucks , didn't last 6k miles and they want $120 for it . I put some cheap $35 brake pad now at 13k miles still has more than 60% left .

 

[jakabony]

Check the lug nuts . My front rotor warped because tire shop air guned it to 300ft lb . I can jump all day on tire iron and it still won't come off.

Factory rear brake pad sucks , didn't last 6k miles and they want $120 for it . I put some cheap $35 brake pad now at 13k miles still has more than 60% left .

Was this on a 10th gen Si? The front and rear rotors on the Si are different than the regular Civic. Front is 12.3 vs 11.1. Rear is 11.1 vs 10.2

 

[BogdanM]

Factory rear brake pad sucks , didn't last 6k miles and they want $120 for it . I put some cheap $35 brake pad now at 13k miles still has more than 60% left .

The fact that some brake pads are soft don't mean they suck. Maybe they are thought to be this way, so the rear brakes bite faster that the front. At least in my case, the car brakes very flat, with minimal pitching under braking and one can feel the back brakes biting very early. Given that the car has dynamic brake force distribution, having the car as level as possible during braking allows the car to send as more braking force as possible to each wheel as opposed to the situation when the car pitches forward, the back axle has little load = > the back axle received minimum braking force. That's also why a worn out set of shocks can mess with your braking performance, as it allows the car to pitch a lot more during braking and you end up braking with 2 out of 4 wheels.
Approaching 5000 miles with a lot of brake pad left, certainly more that half it's thickness.
Moreover, a soft brake pad cannot dig grooves into the brake disk, as opposed to a hard one which under some circumstances can do this.

 

[erbee]

Was this on a 10th gen Si? The front and rear rotors on the Si are different than the regular Civic. Front is 12.3 vs 11.1. Rear is 11.1 vs 10.2

CTR

 

[jakabony]

CTR

Yeah different pad. I am not aware of any specific issues with the Si rear pads wearing out quickly, as opposed to rotor scouring.

 

[DyM]

Check the lug nuts . My front rotor warped because tire shop air guned it to 300ft lb . I can jump all day on tire iron and it still won't come off.

Factory rear brake pad sucks , didn't last 6k miles and they want $120 for it . I put some cheap $35 brake pad now at 13k miles still has more than 60% left .

Thanks for the consideration! In my specific case, I have removed and replaced my wheels a number of times myself, and I always use my torque wrench for that, so overtorquing is not my issue. That said, I'm gonna loosen and tighten them one more time, just to be sure. Furthermore, both of my rears are in the same state whereas both fronts are just fine. I could be wrong but seems like the wear would be uneven if overtorquing at random was the culprit.

 

[jakabony]

I just checked the pad on the side that is scoured. There is a ton of pad life left. I am just wonder if the rotor is of a defective material, or the pad is too hard, or something.

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