My company was purchased by Siemens in October. We recently received an e-mail with supposed discounts that we now get as Siemens employees. I was intrigued by the fact that we get GM and Ford supplier discounts (including subsidiaries like SAAB, etc) and found that Siemens also owns VDO.

While messing around on their site, I found this demo video for electronic braking systems. Looks interesting (as long as you have power).

http://usa.siemensvdo.com/media/images/cc/...a2005/0913b.wmv

http://www.autoblog.com/entry/1234000093072138/

Not sure if anyone is going anywhere with this type of system. My opinion is that it is little more than a solution looking for a problem. I am not 100% sure, but I think the M-B/Bosch system was a hybrid where there was still fluid but the pressure was all electronically controlled. Sort of like a fly-by-wire throttle (M-B/Bosch) versus BMW Valvetronic (this system). Unfortunately I cannot find any documentation at this point.

I'm sure this technology has applications in its current level of maturity, and I'm sure eventually we'll have it in every day cars. I guess I'm getting old since I'm not immediately excited about things such as simulated pedal feel, and a caliper controller reboot being a perfectly normal first step in diagnosing a brake problem.

...I've been thinking of chasing down the development engineers to see if they want to give me one to test on my Firebird. I could temperature-test and check the caliper design for spread. (Though it appears that they have tested for temperature already.)
http://usa.siemensvdo.com/media/images/cc/...tradition02.gif

This should weigh less and only be prone to pad fade rather than pad and pedal (fluid) fade.