I drove my nissan micra with the handbrake on 0.3miles what would be the maximum cost of damage i will have caused to my car?

probably not much- I forget mine too all the time and everything still works fine

Probably not that much. As long as the brakes didn’t overheat you should be ok. 0.3 miles is not that far. You need to find a pretty steep hill and turn the car off, set the brake and see if it holds. I am betting it will hold just fine. When I was a young dumb kid, I used to pull the parking brake on my car while driving about 40 miles per hours and it didn’t do any damage. You will be fine.

Cute car BTW. I had to look it up as I have never heard of it before.

thanks that puts my mind at rest alot. ive been reading online that it costs a good couple of hundred quid to sort out and i cant afford that after just getting a car! ill still get it checked at garage tomorrow though i reckon. at least i shouldnt do it again!

@missingbite cheers, I inherited it off my grandmother. i have a little red one.

I don’t know about where you are, but you should be fine with new pads/shoes and possibly rotors/drums. As for how much that costs…. I can’t say, not knowing where you are.

If it makes you feel any better. I managed to get the front brakes of my Corolla glowing white hot and the rear drums cherry red going down a mountain once. I went almost a mile with the handbrake on, the pedal to the floor, the transmission in gear, and the engine turned off. I never replaced the rears, spent $60 to replace the front rotors and pads, and was fine; no other damage.

If your Nissan is nearly as robust as an ‘87 Toyota, you’ll be fine :)

One third of one mile and you did not notice the effin thing was on? there is a red light in your instrument cluster that would /should have glowed;if it is an Automatic,I would say I can see how you would not notice the drag as you would in a stickshift when it went through the neutral gate as you changed-up the brake’s status would have made itself known.Bottom line don’t sweat it .Nissans are built like brick shithouses and ⅓ of a mile,tish-tosh. no bovver.

@PENDEHO51 The light isn’t always helpful; I once drove a good half-mile or so once without realizing that it was on.
I saw no significant brake damage, by the way, though I can say that the parking brake had stopped being an effective part of the car some months previous.

I drove my car with the emergency brake engaged a couple of time for a short distance and it diminished the effectiveness of the brake. I had to have it fixed but waited until the next time I had maintenance work done. My area isn’t flat so I didn’t wait long.

Emergency brake cables do not hold the shoes tight enough to the drum to cause anything more than normal wear, even over a longer distance than 0.3 miles. Don’t bother taking it in to get it checked, it’s a waste of time. Shoes and drums are possibly the most durable brake design ever created. Not terribly effective when compared to disc, but far more durable and cheaper to replace. My ‘75 Apollo (35 years, 68000 miles) is still using the original shoes and drums on the rears, same with my little ‘99 Mazda Protege (179,000kms).

*Edit: I used to work for Nissan. Micras’ rule. One of the only models that I don’t loath doing an in-depth parts search for. Sentra Classics on the other hand, make me want to burn them all.

This really is no big deal at all.. The handbrake shoes are self adjusting so any wear will automatically be compensated for, besides the material they are made of these days is very hard wearing stuff, check out the service history of the car (if you have all the service documentation ) to find out when the brakes were last inspected or replaced, this should give you some indication of their present condition, provided that the mileage between then & now is minimal, there should be a least 6–7 clicks of the handbrake ratchet when engaging the brake fully, any more than this then they may need to be inspected for drum wear or an over stretched cable, the cable can be adjusted without having to be fully replaced :-/ good luck & happy driving for the future….

Your brakes are fine. At worst, you damaged your handbrake cable, which is only a few hundred dollars. But you probably didn’t even damage that, either.

cheers guys, i didnt notice the light was on as the light is blue and positioned pretty much directly behind my right hand when driving and i was following my friend rather than paying attention to my dash….
ill see how many clicks it takes later, dad says it seems fine as there is 1 maybe 2 clicks left on the handbrake before it seems all the way up whilst parked on my not so steep hill. going to see how it holds on the other side of the hill later which is much much steeper. may look to get it tightened or something soon though.