Brake Disc Manufacturing: Lanchester to ABB Robots

Brake disc manufacturing starts with a ring of cast iron that is machined flat and bolted to a hub. A finished disc has to stay flat at high temperature, wear slowly and, under new European rules, shed less dust. This post goes from Frederick Lanchester's first disc brake in 1902 and Jaguar's win at Le Mans in 1953 to today's cast iron disc lines, coated discs for Euro 7 and robots in casting, machining and coating, with a look at where ABB robots fit.

The front disc brake of a 2020 Chevrolet Bolt EV, seen with the wheel removed. Photo: 4300streetcar / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

How the disc brake beat the drum

For the first half of the twentieth century most cars stopped with drum brakes, even though the disc design is almost as old as the car. In 1902 Frederick William Lanchester patented a caliper type disc brake at his factory in Birmingham and used it on Lanchester cars, although the disc was thin and a cable pressed the pad against it. Chrysler offered its own disc system from 1949 to 1953, and Crosley fitted discs to all its production cars in 1949 and 1950, but the technology was still costly and unreliable.

A 1903 Lanchester 12 h.p. tonneau on the London to Brighton Veteran Car Run in 2004. Photo: Clive Barker / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

At the 1953 24 Hours of Le Mans, the winning Jaguar C-Type was the only car in the race with disc brakes, developed in Britain by Dunlop, and it was the first car at Le Mans to average more than 100 mph. Much of the credit went to the brakes, which kept working through repeated stops from high speed. The same year, fifty Austin-Healey 100S cars became the first European cars sold to the public with discs on all four wheels.

A 1953 Jaguar C-Type, the model that won Le Mans that year with disc brakes, at a classic car event. Photo: DeFacto / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Citroën DS of 1955 was the first car to use modern disc brakes in sustained volume, and Jaguar offered discs on the XK150 from February 1957, followed by the Mark 1 sports saloon and, in 1959, the Mark IX. Most discs were, and still are, made of grey cast iron, which handles heat well and is cheap to cast. Its porous surface brakes well, although it rusts in the rain. A disc line combines a foundry, where iron is poured into moulds, with machine shops that turn the braking faces, drill the bolt holes and check balance. Much of that handling was manual for decades.

Inside a former rail mill used as an iron foundry in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 1989. Photo: Jet Lowe, Historic American Engineering Record, Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Brake discs under Euro 7

Euro 7, agreed in 2024 and in force from 2026, is the first European emissions standard to cover particles from brakes and tyres as well as exhaust, and until 2030 cars with combustion engines may emit more brake dust than electric ones. At IAA Transportation 2026 in Hanover in September, ZF showed its MAXX Uniper air disc brake for heavy trucks, which combines up to 30,000 Nm of brake torque with a coated rotor that ZF says cuts PM10 brake particles by up to 65%. ZF plans to pair it with its axle and driveline systems for diesel, hybrid and battery electric trucks.

An air disc brake on a commercial vehicle axle, the type ZF's new MAXX Uniper belongs to. Photo: Panoha / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

ZF plans to start production in 2027. Coatings mean extra steps after machining, and researchers are trying other materials too. CSIRO in Australia built a prototype stainless steel disc with a hard composite layer, 3 to 4 mm thick, of stainless steel and boron carbide powder laser clad onto the surface by Romar Engineering. The 355 mm disc was designed by Meisterform of Singapore under a research partnership between Singapore's A*STAR and CSIRO, and the layer was meant to be harder and more wear resistant than stainless steel alone. At the expensive end, Porsche's ceramic composite brakes use siliconised carbon fibre discs that weigh about half as much as iron ones and produce much less dust.

A Porsche ceramic composite brake disc with its yellow caliper, shown with silicon carbide at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin. Photo: Daderot / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Robots can take on work at each stage of a disc plant. In the foundry, protected robots such as the ABB IRB 6700 with Foundry Plus can handle hot castings and cores, a job covered in our post on foundry core making. In machining, a compact arm like the new ABB IRB 1700, launched in October 2026 for machine tending and deburring, or a larger IRB 4600 can load lathes. An IRB 660 can stack finished discs on pallets. We found no public ABB brake disc project, so these are possible fits.

An ABB robot seen between the open halves of a die casting die. ABB builds protected Foundry versions of its robots for wet, dirty cells. Photo: ABB

What the next brake disc plants need

In electric cars, regenerative braking lets the motor slow the car, so the friction brakes work less often and cast iron surfaces can rust. Euro 7 also gives electric cars a tighter dust limit. For drivers this should mean cleaner wheels and discs that last longer, though coated or composite discs cost more to replace. For plants it means new coating lines, and robots are a natural fit for moving a disc through spraying or laser cladding.

The front brake disc and caliper of a Chevrolet Bolt EV, an electric car that also slows by regenerative braking. Photo: 4300streetcar / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Heavy discs for trucks and buses are another job for robots, since they are awkward and tiring to lift all day. Inspection is also moving to cameras and sensors that check every disc for cracks, thickness and balance before it is packed. Cells that combine handling, coating and inspection are complex to lay out, so integrators usually build and test them first in RobotStudio and then commission them on site. Each move near a hot casting or a coating gun also has to be planned around the people who work nearby.

An ABB IRB 1700 in a demonstration cell on ABB's stand at CIIF in Shanghai, October 2026. Photo: ABB

Foundries are hot, dusty places, so robots there need protection and regular maintenance, and the cost of a coating line has to be paid back on volumes that vary from model to model. Laser cladding and ceramic composites are still expensive. The heavy duty PM10 limit for trucks is not expected until early 2030, so some makers may wait before investing, and ZF's 65% figure is the supplier's own claim until independent tests are published. Plants also need technicians who understand metallurgy and robot programming at the same time.

An ABB IRB 660 palletizer, the kind of robot that stacks finished parts at the end of a line. Photo: ABB

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