Tesla’s, like most EVs, don’t often use their brakes for day-to-day driving. This can leave corrosion from being unused or make your brakes squeak or squeal when you do use them.
Tesla advises that for squeaky brakes, user burnishing may be the solution. They also advise that brakes should be burnished when replacing either the brake pads, or brake rotors.
How to Burnish your Brakes
Enter Service Mode, following this guide. After that, navigate to the Chassis section. There, you can find the button to begin brake burnishing. The on-screen instructions will be similar to the ones below, and will advise you on how to proceed with burnishing your brakes.
Let’s go through the procedure step-by-step.
1. You’ll want to find an empty, straight stretch of road – burnishing your brakes in regular traffic is ill-advised.
2. Drive the vehicle at speed – approximately 50-55mph, or 80-90km/h, on a straight road.
3. Apply a consistent, moderate pressure to the brake pedal, slowly decelerating the vehicle. You can release the brakes at around 10mph, or 15km/h.
4. Repeat steps 2-3 six more times, waiting 30 seconds between laps.
Once that’s complete, you will have burnished your brakes. This means of burnishing is the same one that Tesla Service uses when your brake pads or rotors are swapped, or when they’re trying to diagnose and fix a squeaky brake.
Hopefully, that will have solved your issue of squeaky brakes. In the meantime, to prevent future issues and reduce corrosion, you can also use Tesla’s Blended Braking mode, which applies the friction brakes when regenerative braking cannot keep up.
Blended Braking
Blended Braking mode only works when the regenerative braking isn’t at full capacity – such as when the car is at 100% battery, or you’re braking extremely hard. You can find the blended braking option under Vehicle Settings > Dynamics (or Pedals & Steering if you’re not on 2024.14 – Spring Update yet) > Apply Brakes when Regenerative Steering is Limited.
