Hard up for details on Porsche?s new Surface Coated Brakes, or PSCB for short" We visited with the company’s braking and chassis engineers in Germany for more information, and we can say this much: They’re more than just a new way for Porsche to empty your pockets of a few thousand bucks. Besides the brakes’ size and gleaming white-painted calipers, they feature iron rotors coated in a thin, ultra-hard layer of tungsten carbide. This gives them an edge in performance along with reduced wear and dust production over the 2019 Cayenne SUV?s standard-fitment iron rotors. Here’s how they work:
From Dust to (Less) Dust
Porsche’s pathological commitment to outbraking the competition with shorter stopping distances and minimal fade makes for a few minor annoyances, such as: Some Porsches’ brakes occasionally squeal and can give off lots of dust. While many Porsche customers gladly accept the trade-offs for maximum braking performance, some have been pining for the stopping power expected of a performance car with less noise and dust. Porsche looked at using low-noise, low-dust brake pads as every other manufacturer does. Testing revealed these ?comfort pads,? as Porsche calls them, to be unsatisfactory. (Just look at how they doomed a Nissan 370Z we lapped at our annual Lightning Lap track test a few years ago.) So, working with Bosch, Porsche homed in on the rotor instead.

Porsche found that discs are responsible for the majorit...