The guy at my tire shop told me that I need new brake pads. Which is believable because I do have almost 70K on it. I thought the price was a little high, but he said that they were ceramic pads so they cost more. Is Carbon metalic or ceramic OEM on an '03?
do you do your own brake replacement? if so just go to a auto store and they will know oem replacement. I think they were non ceramic as they had CRAP loads of brake dust.
To add to Northvibes post, you will always pay more for parts at the shop... Markup, ya know... doing the fronts on a vibe is EASY, I have a tutorial for it here somewhere... find it, have a look, you'll see, it's really quite easy...
I might look into doing it myself, but it just surprised me that the guy tried to tell me that the OEM pads were ceramic. Thinking that he just wanted to justify charging 30% more for service than anybody else that I have talked to today.Maybe if I was driving a Ferrari, or at the very least a Mustang, I might have believed him.
I bought ceramic pads from Tire Rack (Akebono) when doing brakes on our Vibe. They provided a ton of initial bite and felt like the car could stop on a dime. When the brakes go on our Matrix, I'll be looking into those.
Ceramic pads are very common on many cars now. I like them cause they are low-dust but still very strong street pad. The dust is less of an issue with steel wheels but with alloys, I would stay with the lowest dust pad you can get - I hate black dust on nice rims, a pet-peeve I guess.
I was told by my auto parts place that the OEM pads on my '03 were Ceramic. I would believe him, since I got 90K mile out of them. Well worth the extra ca$h.
I have an '03 GT, and I'm pretty sure ceramics were the OEM. I bought a set of Bendix CQ pads online at auto parts warehouse, had them within a couple of days. Good price too.
2003 Vibe GT 6-SpeedAEM Short Ram CAIMegan Racing Strut Tower BraceComing Someday: Magnaflow Exhaust