Over the past few years, its seems like more and more regular cars have multi-piston brake calipers like the new subaru impreza. 10 or 15years ago, even performance oriented cars didn’t frequently have those until you went pretty far up market. And it doesn’t seem like it is for marketing, since it isn’t often advertised. If single piston calipers were good for an audi s4, why does a new subaru impreza need multi-piston calipers? have there been developments in cost or technology?
Multi piston hydraulic brakes are big in the mountain bike community and offer not just more braking capability but also the ability to feather the brakes better, improving what’s I’d call “braking accuracy. Simply put, if I only want to apply 20% of total braking capability I can do that by feel in a much more intuitive fashion
Yup, we call that “brake modulation” and on track cars that largely comes from the ability to use larger brake masters, lower mu pads, and stiffer calipers that all come with the multi-piston monoblocks. I sort of referred to this off hand when talking about how road cars actually are not set up for what real racing brakes require. In a race car you’ll actually find the pedals are pretty stiff and require a *lot* of effort, because it’s easier to modulate when the force spectrum is say 0-100 lbs as opposed to 0-20.