Your emails: Foot-actuated vs. electronic parking brakes

[MUSIC] Hey, folks, Brian Cooley here from CNET On Cars, taking another of your emails about high tech cars and modern driving, this time from Craig Z. He asks, what would be the rationale for what he sees as most Asian automakers continuing to use a foot actuated parking brake, the old ratchet pedal down on the side of the car there. Instead, it'd be an electronic parking brake. He says I recently test drove a Q50, an Infinity Q50 and was kind of surprised that a car that cost that much still had an old fashioned pedal brake. This is interesting, now electronic parking brakes we've seen in a fair number of cars Frequently in German cars as you probably noticed, it's an electric switch you push or pull to turn the parking brakes on. Here's what I think is going with some of the car maker's reaction to that. It does add some cost and complexity vs. the plain old pedal and cable parking brake. Pedals, of course, for the most part never fail. I mean in the old days, you might have had some rust and corrosion that might lock them on. I doubt that ever happens anymore. They're dead simple and probably super cheap at this point to integrate and you don't use them that often. They're not a high touch component in the car. With that said, however, notice that when an automaker has automatic hill hold, they do have Electro-mechanical braking. Where the car senses an incline, puts the brakes on, holds you there until you depress the gas and then it releases you to drive again. That's basically electronic parking brake, but without putting it into a switch to actually be a parking brake. Same tech, different implementation. Someone is gonna puzzle why some cars have hill hold but not EPB. But I think the bottom line is. Pedal mounted brakes are still real simple, they always work. And I don't think a lot of consumer complain about them. [SOUND]