Imagine driving away in a recently bought luxury SUV only to find that the brakes hardly work. It’s not the end of the world, brake pads wear off, you can just replace them, but what if you find that the car doesn’t even come with licensed brake pads? That’s what happened to a German motorist who discovered that the Mercedes GLE he had bought at an auction was equipped with simple blocks of wood instead of real brake pads.

The man, whose name has not been revealed by German media, told police in Ludwigsburg that he had realized something was wrong with his used Mercedes GLE the moment he pushed the brake pedal after buying it at an auction. The car barely slowed down, no matter how hard he slammed the brakes, so he called a tow truck and took it straight to a repair shop.

Photo: Ludwigsburg Police

Upon inspecting the brake system, the mechanics found that instead of authorized brake pads, the SUV was equipped with wooden pads with the ‘Brembo’ brand scribbled on them in permanent marker. They offered almost no stopping power and had already damaged the vehicle’s disks.

“This is not even amateurism, but criminal sloppiness,” Hans Bauer, a technical safety expert who helped with the investigation, told the German newspaper Stuttgarter Nachrichten, adding that the wood wears out almost instantly when rubbing against the metal disks and has no chance of stopping a 2-tonne vehicle.

Photo: Ludwigsburg Police

German police have opened a criminal case against the former owner for interfering with a car’s critical security elements, but their reason for replacing the vehicle’s brake pads with wooden blocks remains unknown.