I plan on taking my M3 Performance to the track for some HPDE. I know that the brakes get really hot on the track and applying parking brakes for more than just a few minutes can cause serious damage. I can’t find anything in the owners manual or in the “Track mode” settings that allow me to “park” the car after a track session without the parking brake being set. Seems there’s got to be a way around the parking brake. Can I put it in neutral somehow and be able to walk away for a comfort stop? If so, I could easily put a set of blocks around a wheel so it doesn’t roll away.
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How to turn off the parking brake on a M3?
- Thread starter DoctorJay
- Start date
Ok, I went and tried this myself. Holding P DOES NOT do something extra with the car, despite the click you sometimes hear.
The click is it trying to engage the parking brake again. The parking brake has no sensors to report position. So holding P just engages it blindly, even if it was already engaged. The hardware is designed to do this without damage.
If it's already engaged, you hear the parking brake click, because it immediately binds up and can't move.
If it's not, you hear the gear whine for a few seconds as it engages.
If you hold P while already in park, this means the brake was already engaged, and you are re-engaging and get a click. But put the car in drive, disengaging the brake, and hold P. You get the red P symbol, but you hear normal engagement whine with no click, because it wasn't engaged before. Exactly as if you had just put it in park.
Holding P just engages the same brake in the same way as the automated processes. It's just there as a backup, and it will blindly engage the brake no matter what state the car is in, no matter if it already thinks the brake is engaged, like an old traditional hand brake.
The click is it trying to engage the parking brake again. The parking brake has no sensors to report position. So holding P just engages it blindly, even if it was already engaged. The hardware is designed to do this without damage.
If it's already engaged, you hear the parking brake click, because it immediately binds up and can't move.
If it's not, you hear the gear whine for a few seconds as it engages.
If you hold P while already in park, this means the brake was already engaged, and you are re-engaging and get a click. But put the car in drive, disengaging the brake, and hold P. You get the red P symbol, but you hear normal engagement whine with no click, because it wasn't engaged before. Exactly as if you had just put it in park.
Holding P just engages the same brake in the same way as the automated processes. It's just there as a backup, and it will blindly engage the brake no matter what state the car is in, no matter if it already thinks the brake is engaged, like an old traditional hand brake.
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I know that Tesla's UI is pretty quirky but if a quick push on the drive stalk sets the Parking Brake (but doesn't show the red icon), why did they include two other specific processes to do the same thing? Both of those processes show the red icon.
I guess that is a question that maybe only Tesla could answer.
The traditional hand brake (or parking brake) is not quite the same; it did not duplicate something that had already happened.
Is there any circumstance, in day to day driving, where you would follow Tesla's procedure to set the Parking Brake?
In any event, time for me to move on from this topic.
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Like I keep saying, having a parking brake the driver can control is a legal requirement for a vehicle. All cars with an electronic, automatic parking brake have a button to engage it manually whenever you want.
The FVMSS requires all sorts of things. Kind of like backup cameras and defroster controls, which means that when the center screen fails, your car isn't technically legal, and why NHTSA forced a recall when S/X screens were failing too often even though the car would drive.
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