Hyundai Paywalls Brake Pads replacement on Ioniq 5 N

Summary

The biggest car news and reviews, no BS Our free daily newsletter sends the stories that really matter directly to you, every weekday. A 2025 Hyundai Ioniq 5 N owner was venting on Reddit recently about not being able to change his brake pads without specialized computer equipment. It sounds insane, but this is what new-car ownership is like in 2025. We did some digging and made contact with Hyundai to understand the situation and break it down for you—it’s a frustrating one. Having to talk to computers to fix a car isn’t necessarily unique to the Korean automaker, but I fell into a rabbit hole of Hyundai maintenance research here, so that’ll be our focus for the moment. Context for casual readers: Brake pad and rotor replacements are super basic car maintenance. You won’t need to do the job nearly as often on an electric car (thanks to regenerative braking), but even EV pads don’t last forever. On most cars, part of the job involves disconnecting or retracting the parking brake, which usually grabs the rear wheels. Many modern cars, and all EVs, have an electronic parking brake controlled by a computer signal, rather than a manually adjustable nut-and-cable situation. This is what sparked Redditor u/SoultronicPear’s justifiable frustration. One more piece of stage-setting: Since electronic parking brakes are indeed common, many readily available diagnostic tools (pretty basic OBD scanners) can issue a retract-brake command to a car’s ECU. Still, you do need one with bi-directional test functionality. Remember that point—it will become significant again in a few paragraphs. Wondering if your car has an electronic parking brake or a cable one? It’s very easy to tell—if you’ve got a button or switch (left), it’s electronic. Parking brakes with big, satisfying handles (like on the right) are mechanical. stock.adobe.com Apparently, no cheap scanner option worked on the original Reddit poster’s Ioniq 5 N. That led them on a journey of attempting to access commercial-grad...