John Ha wrote:

Rudi wrote:

My 2016 Edge has the electric e-brake. I don't believe that it was meant to stop a vehicle that is moving.It only works when the car is stopped and it disengages when the ignition is turned on..

No disrespect intended to anyone but the OP stated specifically "Emergency brake", not "Parking brake".  The "old" "emergency brake" was a backup to the primary brakes if the primary brake failed for some reason. 

When I was learning to drive (this was, admittedly, not too long after Noah emptied the ark after the great flood) I learned that if you pushed on the brake pedal and nothing happened, you were to turn off the ignition and use the emergency brake to bring the car to a safe stop. 

Maybe that's completely outdated now that everything is so reliable - I don't know.  On a classic Mustang, it's not clear to me (and this is my opinion, not a criticism) that changing the emergency brake to an electric unit is something you'd really want to do. I suppose that all things considered, there are so many things that can fail and bring the car to a stop that it's really a rhetorical question anyway.

In the end it is your car, your decision is the only one that matters and you should do as you please with it. 

If you know anything about Model Ts this makes sense.  They had two brakes.  One was a band type at the rear axle, the other a band inside the transmission.  The transmission band was the brake, the axle band was the emergency brake; to be used should the trans band fail.  Guys who were skilled would try to avoid using the trans band or axle band, and instead mostly slow the vehicle by carefully engaging low gear and then reverse.  If you could slip it properly you could get it to stop without using any brakes at all.  The advantage was that you wore all the bands in the trans evenly instead of just burning out the brake band all the time.  Thus reducing service costs.  Having once lost all brakes in my '76 CJ5 I actually used this method and found it worked just fine.  Its not suitable for primary braking, but in an emergency, if you have space to stop; it works. 

So its a valid question about the E-brake vs. a parking brake.  I would surmise that most new vehicles use it as a parking brake.  It holds the vehicle while parked, but its not designed to stop you effectively in an emergency.  Modern cars with dual circuit hydraulic brakes are fairly reliable, unless the master fails, but that's extremely uncommon in my experience. 
 

I'm also looking at something like this for a parking brake. Lots of calipers availabe on Amazon for cheap and the disk would be a easy fab.

Last edited by Rudi (10/24/2017 3:27 PM)

Off road trucks that run huge tires often abandon wheel braking in favor of driveshaft brakes.  The wheels and tires are so heavy that the wheel brakes become ineffective.  I've seen a buddy of mine fab up a couple setups.  Really quite easy. 

Mine is from an MG midget. Austin Healey Sprites are the same. It is compact and works well.