Always.
I don’t however always remember to take it off, and it haradly makes a difference when driving off in our last couple of cars. Luckily my new car saw a nice little red brake light on the dashboard to let me know before the smell reaches my nose.
Otara
I use the parking brakes when parking on my automatic transmission pickup; it’s totally a muscle-memory holdover from my last vehicle, which was a manual transmission pickup.
The only changes I really made were that my left foot doesn’t need to push the clutch in (I did this spastic left-leg kicking thing for months after getting the automatic, BTW), otherwise the other hands and foot do basically the same exact thing.
When I’m driving a car with a handbrake (my wife’s), I rarely remember to put it on- it’s not part of the routine.
Every time I park.
Every time I park I set the parking brake.
I learned on this board to set it before putting it into park.
I had used the parking/emergency brake with my old truck when I had no brakes. I wish I had done that first before throwing the transmission into park, which only slowed me down. The parking brake brought me to a sideways screeching stop.
If it was an emergency brake, there wouldn’t be a one-way ratchet on the lever; it would release as soon as you stopped pulling/pushing on it. The ratchet is a clue that this device is designed to remain applied while you are absent. IOW, it’s a parking brake.
On automatic-transmission vehicles, I’ve never seen a parking pawl break due to being loaded while parked on a steep hill - but I have driven some that were very difficult to get out of “P” because the parking brake had been set after the previous driver put it in “P” and released the driving brake. I don’t generally bother with the parking brake when parking an automatic on flat or gently-sloping ground, but on anything with a significant slope, I will set the p-brake before releasing the driving brake. When starting the car up again, I set the driving brake and take it out of park before releasing the p-brake.
on my manual-transmission car, I use the p-brake every time I park, regardless of slope.
Heh, here in everyday colloquial speech the Mechanically Actuated Secondary Brake is simply referred to as “la emergencia”.
Saintly Loser, many American cars still use the pedal-operated parking brake, only that rather than a hand-pulled release they now have a design by which you release by pressing it again all the way down.
Myself I prefer the handbrake lever – if you *hold down *the ratchet button it becomes a continuous control so you can do controlled release/reapplication as emergency brake, while the pedal operation restricts you to all-or-nothing use. I have done empty-lot test-drives of using it as emergency brake (just so I know) and the verdict is “beats nothing, but to to have to do this at full traffic speed on a busy stretch of freeway, or on a twisting mountain road, would be an experience I can live without”.
I always set it as parking brake, to me it’s matter of establishing a habit so I do it automatically in case the circumstance requires it. In my car (automatic) it prevents the start of motion in gear at idle or near-idle. That tends to be my tell – if on level ground I put the car in reverse to get out of my parking space and it does not start crawling backward as I release the regular brakes, I probably still have the parking brake set.