Brake pads on just one wheel catching fire or wearing out very quickly is becoming more common as Electronic Stability Control (ESC) equipped vehicles age and the sensors start to fail. What happened in the video with a Mercedes Benz ML 320 is the yaw rate sensor or the steering angle sensor is producing erroneous data. The car could be traveling in a straight line, but the sensor may think the car is sliding into a ditch. The ESC system will engage the brakes for the one wheel in an attempt to correct the slide. The driver may have felt only a slight pull on the wheel no worse than fighting the crown on some roads.

A yaw sensor measures the vehicle’s rotation around its vertical axis, while at the same time measuring the acceleration at right angles to the driving direction. By electronically evaluating the measured values, the sensor is able to differentiate between normal cornering and vehicle skidding movements. Yaw rate is measured in degrees per second. If you have a vehicles making a 90º turn in two seconds, it would have a yaw rate of 45º.

The stability control system measures the effectiveness of its correction made with the brake system. How effective the correction is depends on the condition of the contact patch of the tires. If the system does not see the yaw of steering angle to change, it will increase the correction with the brakes for maybe a single wheel.

If the sensor is sending out false data, it will get stuck in a “feedback loop” and torture the brake pads for just one wheel and potentially cause the pads to fail.

The tell tale signs of failure is brake dust build up on just one wheel. This is why I am an advocate of washing your own car on a regular basis. Yaw sensor and ESC sensor can be expensive to replace, tacking on a set of pads makes it even more expensive.