458 brake failure

Yeah, well every man made object can fail. Even brakes on F1 cars fail. It's not a frequent occurence though.

 

Yes I had the same thing happen to me on a 458. The brake pedal went solid when I pressed it and ever increasing amounts of pressure would barely slow the car.
Ferrari refused to admit there was anything wrong, so I hired an external engineer who worked at the highest level of the car industry.
Hi hired a 458 and replicated Brake Booster valve failure and got exactly the same results as me .
Ferrari claim the brake booster can’t fail on the 458 but it seems to fail too often for comfort . I know for certain people have lost their lives as a result of this failure .
With the booster , which multiplies your pedal force by at least 6 times at the callipers, you would need to press at least 6 times harder than you expect to get the normal braking force. On the road, when you are taken by surprise by the failure , you just can’t do that . Trust me . I know .

 

You need to trust me on this ....The brakes on the 458 fail .....Mine did and it changed the life of many people .
Of course Ferrrai said it could never happen.
Yet .....It did happen . On the public road . Commuting to work . Not fast . Just no brakes or at least an unexpected failure of the booster .

 

I had brake failure on the Hockenheim circuit after 10 rounds …

Every next round at the same hairpin, after 50 meters the brakes were working perfectly again .. 8 more rounds …

Techs said it's a ABS Ecu fault.

 

I had failure of the brakes ( or at least it felt that way ) on my way to work, on a road I had driven 1000 times. The car had been driven for 30 minutes, very gently and was travelling at 50 mph when the brake pedal went rock solid and there was no noticeable deceleration. The car rolled for 100 metres until it crashed.
I had a lot of external investigation done because Ferrari refused to accept that it could ever happen ( yet it did ) and obviously blamed driver error. ( I had driven for 30 years without an incident ) The conclusion was that the brake booster valve failed. It appears to happen more than anyone would like to admit.

 

Is there any upgraded part or fix?


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Subscribed. This is concerning.

 

Also subscribed...

 

I had my brakes checked several times on 458 cause I never had a good feeling with them.
Sometimes their braking power was really very very weak.
On 488 much better.

 

Also subscribed.

Looking at getting a 458 in a year, but this finding is concerning. If this is a real defect, its the worst type you can have because it seems to be unpredictable and the manufacturer is reluctant to investigate it seriously. Consider how many incidents and complaints there are and how many client-miles driven out there for this vehicle. If this happened in a Ford pickup, it would be far more visible. Seems like a brake booster wouldnt be the most painful recall for manufacturer (beats swapping the entire frame on my old truck!)

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I drove my 458 quite hard and never experienced this in over 3 years and about 10,000 miles. However, I did have a brake booster fail on another (non-Ferrari) car once and the sudden loss of assistance can feel like you have no brakes.

Because the ECU can modulate the brakes in certain circumstances, I wonder if turning ESC-OFF would have an impact? Or perhaps clearing the ECU with a battery disconnect?

On a highly computerized car, I personally think clearing the ECU ever few months is good practice. With over 35 years in the computer programming field, I can tell you that even the best programmers can write code that overflows a stack or has memory leaks and/or memory can just end up with slight parity errors over time, etc. Sure we routinely run Unix severs for a year or two without a reboot, but I'm also not driving my OpenBSD sever down the highway at 100+

I used to reset my 458, every so often, just for good measure. With my 360, I'd reset it once a month like clock work.

Ray

 

A reset three four times a year is a good idea

 

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We had a 458 go off the track at tight turn 2 at a F track day. No deceleration at all and hit the wall. We were told at the time by the organisers (driver was whisked away to hospital for checks) he must have hit the brake and accel at the same time!
You know what sprung to my mind..!

 

I did bypass the 458 after my friends episode and things like above and bought a 488.
So far so good. I do push on track days and only thing is pedal feels a bit soft sometimes.

 

I had the same problem with my Spider with terrible consequences. Pedal went solid. Lost almost all braking. Certainly in an emergency situation it felt like there was no brakes, even if what happened was a loss of the Brake Booster. Ferrari claims it can never happen. It seems to happen way too often.

 

Yep...When my Spider crashed and Ferrari were brought in ( there was a Court case ), they claimed it was impossible for this to fail.....Yet it did, and it does for many others too.

 

Is this different than the AVH/brake issue that some 488 owners have been reporting on here? Wow...


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Did you determine the cause? Was it a booster problem or a problem with the vacuum lines or check valves, or perhaps a software glitch.

I would imagine that if were due to a software glitch that after the failure, with a restart , the system was in proper working order.

 

Booster failure seems a very likely cause given how some 488 brake failures have been described (hard pedal and virtually no braking power)...

 

I guess either way a Ferrari production road car should not do that

IMO it’s a very eye opening matter, ala takata airbag maybe, if you have situations where a modern Ferrari is on the road with inoperable brakes...


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If vacuum was lost could that produce a hard pedal with no play and no stopping power?

Or what about a software glitch?

The same brake booster part is used in both the 458 and 488

 

I had my brake booster fail on my 458 challenge couple of weeks ago. I was still able to get almost all the braking on it, but it took a much larger effort on the pedal. Like pushing down as hard as you possibly can. According to the data, I still had almost the same g load in deceleration as I have with the booster.We replaced both the booster and master cylinder (about $500 in parts and took us a couple of hours to do, not hard at all) and they are back to normal.

As it is a challenge car, its some what faster to replace, as we don't have a lot of cosmetic panels to deal with and the seat comes out easily for good access to the brake pedal linkage. A street car will be the same principal, but probably a few more tasks to complete.

I was told that root cause on failing boosters is a small leak in the master cylinder that allows some brake fluid to get on the booster diaphragm, which eats away at the rubber and causes a vacuum leak.

Not sure if this has any bearing on the OP's situation, but its a data point for consideration.

 

Did your car have any previous episodes or other symptoms? On start up, was the pedal rock hard and were you unable to engage a gear?

 

Didn’t affect gear selection at all, as the challenge car is programmed differently than the street car. The pedal was hard, but it always is hard in the challenge car.

I actually liked the manual feel of the brakes, on track it was easier to get a sense of what the contact patch was doing. Just too much effort. In a real manual setup, the master cylinder would probably be sized differently. Still have more effort, but not to this point. We could actually see the sheet metal of the firewall flex when I tested it and put in the same pedal force. I was probably pushing with a couple of hundred pounds.