> There’s a button for the hand brake now, it’s called the ‘electronic parking brake’. Nopeity nope nope. It’s called the oh-shit brake for a reason. I want to yank on that summabitch like my life depended on it, because — it might.
At best doing that will do absolutely nothing useful, as anyone who's accidentally driven off with it set will know. At worst it'll spin you, since the hand brakes only lock the rear wheels. This is used deliberately to perform a "handbrake turn", but if you're yanking it like your life depends on it you're turning a front impact with big crumple zones into a side impact.
I will say that my grandfather once limped a car to safety (slowly) using the handbrake after the brakes failed on a hot day. That was in the 70s.
I suspect modern brakes are much less likely to outright fail like that, and so I don’t know if we still need the emergency aspect of the emergency brake as much.
At best doing that will do absolutely nothing useful, as anyone who's accidentally driven off with it set will know. At worst it'll spin you, since the hand brakes only lock the rear wheels. This is used deliberately to perform a "handbrake turn", but if you're yanking it like your life depends on it you're turning a front impact with big crumple zones into a side impact.