Designing Parking Brake Systems for Lower Efforts

FMVSS 105-75 imposed maximum effort to be applied to the parking brake on passenger vehicles to hold the vehicle on 20% and 30% grades. The previous unlimited regulation had allowed vehicles to be built with grade parking efforts beyond the ability of many drivers. For the Ford vehicle range, an average improvement of 40% was required to comply with the new regulation. This paper describes the program entered into by Ford to establish the most cost effective method of achieving the improvement.