Braking Behavior

A friend/coworker of mine has a 2013 SL that he bought used a year or so ago. Recently, he has experienced some odd braking behavior. This has happened twice. He was on the interstate here in town and got cut off by a semi .. he had to slam on the brakes ... here is his description of what happened:

"antilock kicked in and when releasing the brake pedal it kept braking at full force. probably takes 2 full seconds for the brakes to release"

Have any of you experienced this or do you have any idea what might be happening? I've never experienced this. He did have the controller reprogrammed as part of that recent recall, but that was several months ago. I am not sure of his mileage but it's relatively average for the age of the car.

thanks!

jamieo said:

A friend/coworker of mine has a 2013 SL that he bought used a year or so ago. Recently, he has experienced some odd braking behavior. This has happened twice. He was on the interstate here in town and got cut off by a semi .. he had to slam on the brakes ... here is his description of what happened:

"antilock kicked in and when releasing the brake pedal it kept braking at full force. probably takes 2 full seconds for the brakes to release"

Have any of you experienced this or do you have any idea what might be happening? I've never experienced this. He did have the controller reprogrammed as part of that recent recall, but that was several months ago. I am not sure of his mileage but it's relatively average for the age of the car.

thanks!

Click to expand...

I've never had that happen on my '13S but I'm not sure I've had to slam on the breaks that hard. I do frequently observe the sensation that the breaks stop breaking for a millisecond, most often when getting off the freeway in a hard breaking situation where there are bumps or a pothole in the road. I've also experienced this on our Prius so it may just have something to do with regenerative breaking, it's kind of a unnerving feeling even if it just lasts a very short period of time

jamieo said:

A friend/coworker of mine has a 2013 SL that he bought used a year or so ago. Recently, he has experienced some odd braking behavior. This has happened twice. He was on the interstate here in town and got cut off by a semi .. he had to slam on the brakes ... here is his description of what happened:

"antilock kicked in and when releasing the brake pedal it kept braking at full force. probably takes 2 full seconds for the brakes to release"

Have any of you experienced this or do you have any idea what might be happening? I've never experienced this.

Click to expand...

I don't recall experiencing this but this sounds normal.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_brake_assist and Google for nissan brake assist.

jamieo said:

A friend/coworker of mine has a 2013 SL that he bought used a year or so ago. Recently, he has experienced some odd braking behavior. This has happened twice. He was on the interstate here in town and got cut off by a semi .. he had to slam on the brakes ... here is his description of what happened:

"antilock kicked in and when releasing the brake pedal it kept braking at full force. probably takes 2 full seconds for the brakes to release"

Have any of you experienced this or do you have any idea what might be happening? I've never experienced this. He did have the controller reprogrammed as part of that recent recall, but that was several months ago. I am not sure of his mileage but it's relatively average for the age of the car.

thanks!

Click to expand...

From what I recall reading, this is intentional feature design. As I understand the reasoning: an emergency braking situation has been detected and there is a chance you may be injured, unwilling, or otherwise rendered incapable of maintaining adequate brake pressure. So the car locks down the brakes to make sure you do come to a full stop.

I think that Nissan calls it "Automatic Emergency Braking Assist" or something like that.

Yes. I have had this happen. I had someone cut in front of me and I jammed on the brakes. Once the danger was over, I let off the brakes and the car continued to brake hard. I did strike me as odd at the time.

jamieo said:

A friend/coworker of mine has a 2013 SL that he bought used a year or so ago. Recently, he has experienced some odd braking behavior. This has happened twice. He was on the interstate here in town and got cut off by a semi .. he had to slam on the brakes ... here is his description of what happened:

"antilock kicked in and when releasing the brake pedal it kept braking at full force. probably takes 2 full seconds for the brakes to release"

Have any of you experienced this or do you have any idea what might be happening? I've never experienced this. He did have the controller reprogrammed as part of that recent recall, but that was several months ago. I am not sure of his mileage but it's relatively average for the age of the car.

thanks!

Click to expand...

There are some other threads about this issue, but I will summarize my experience here:
Nissan calls it "Brake Assist" and it is very disconcerting when it gets activated. My first experience with brake assist was while driving my 2011 LEAF under similar conditions to what you describe. When a pickup towing a large trailer started moving into my lane, I had nowhere to go and hit the brakes hard (but not hard enough to engage the ABS from my foot pressure). I was very surprised when the car took over and applied the brakes harder which caused the ABS to activate. After I scrubbed off enough speed so the trailer was safely in front of me, I let off the brakes to reduce the risk of being hit from behind and was again surprised to have the car continue severe braking with my foot completely off the brake pedal. I eventually pressed the accelerator and the brakes released.

After this experience, I did some testing in a safe area and found that I could make brake assist activate every time by very quickly moving my foot from the accelerator to the brake. The car seems to look for quick release of accelerator followed by immediate braking. On my 2011, the brake assist action was different if activated at lower speeds vs. highway speeds. At lower speeds, the brakes would release with some time delay after completely removing my foot from the brake pedal. If activated at higher speeds, the brake assist would keep braking until the car came to a complete stop. During this testing, I discovered that I could get the brakes to release immediately by pressing the accelerator.

I considered this to be a safety issue so I took the car to the dealer. The LEAF tech agreed it was not right and wanted to start replacing parts. Nissan Corporate told them the car was normal and not to make any repairs. My dealer was very sympathetic when they were forced to return my car after a few days of troubleshooting without making any repairs. Since I don't have to deal with snow and ice while driving the LEAF, I decided I could safely keep driving it by conditioning myself to move my foot back to the accelerator after hard braking. I also discovered that I could hit the brakes really hard if cruise control was engaged and not have brake assist activate (probably because the computers do not see the release of the accelerator followed by immediate braking).

I have over 24,000 miles on the 2015 now without having brake assist activate so I suspect Nissan engineers may have desensitized it a bit compared to the 2011.

Gerry

Thanks, all .. I will send him your replies

I've had it happen in my '12 SL as well. Same as Gerry noted, had to evade someone changing into my lane without looking, and also let up off brakes to avoid getting rear ended. Fortunately person behind me slowed quickly as well, so all OK. But, it is very startling to let off brakes and have them keep being applied. I didn't realize application of throttle would release it, will remember if that happens again.

jjeff said:

I've never had that happen on my '13S but I'm not sure I've had to slam on the breaks that hard. I do frequently observe the sensation that the breaks stop breaking for a millisecond, most often when getting off the freeway in a hard breaking situation where there are bumps or a pothole in the road. I've also experienced this on our Prius so it may just have something to do with regenerative breaking, it's kind of a unnerving feeling even if it just lasts a very short period of time

Click to expand...

I've noticed the same thing over the 3 years I've had my '13 and it is a bit unnerving! Interesting to know others have experienced the same thing.