The single most important safety system in any car is the braking system. Here is how it works and how it can be improved. The braking system in a car has a single purpose - to reduce the car's speed, potentially to zero and maintain it there for as long as the driver requires. It needs to do this as quickly as possible and repeatedly, depending on the nature of the road that the car is travelling. It does this by converting the car's kinetic energy - the energy it has by nature of its movement - into heat energy by generating friction between moving and stationary parts of the braking system. The heat energy needs to be dissipated somehow and this leads onto another aspect, which we'll discuss in a moment.
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