My 2024 Honda Civic just started making that awful grinding noise when I brake. I checked and the pads look pretty thin but not completely gone. Is this normal or did I mess something up? I mostly do city driving with a lot of stop-and-go traffic.
Eight thousand miles is way too early for brake pads to be grinding on a 2024 car - that's definitely not normal wear. City driving with lots of stop-and-go actually shouldn't accelerate pad wear that much either, so something's off. Could be a defect in the pads themselves, a caliper issue, or even debris stuck between the pad and rotor. Get it checked at a Honda dealer or trusted mechanic soon, because grinding means metal-to-metal contact that'll damage your rotors if you keep driving on it, which gets expensive fast.
Don't ignore the grinding noise and just keep driving - that's how you end up replacing rotors instead of just pads. Metal-on-metal grinding at 8,000 miles on a new car points to either defective pads (they wear unevenly sometimes) or a stuck caliper that's not releasing properly. I had a similar situation with an older vehicle where one caliper seized up just enough to keep constant pressure on the pad, and it sounded exactly like what you're describing well before the pads should have been worn down. Get under there and check if one wheel is getting hotter than the others, or better yet, have a shop pull the wheels and inspect both the pad thickness and whether the calipers are actually retracting. Since it's a 2024, this should be warranty work.
That grinding sound almost always means your brake pad wear indicator is hitting the rotor - the little metal tab built into the pad that's supposed to warn you before the pad material completely wears away. At 8k miles, something's definitely off, and it could be a combination of factors like aggressive braking habits, a manufacturing defect in those pads, or even a stuck caliper that's wearing one pad way faster than the other.
Before you assume it's just normal and keep driving, get under there and check if both front pads are wearing evenly - I've seen folks drive around thinking they're fine when really one side is barely there and the other still has material, which usually points to a caliper issue that'll get expensive if you ignore it long enough.
Get it to a Honda dealer ASAP since you're still under warranty - they'll diagnose whether it's a defective pad set or something else going on with your braking system, and you shouldn't pay for that on a brand new car.
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