Trickle chargers are pretty affordable. I also keep a jump pack around as well, I use Noco for both. Either one is a really good tool to have handy and will solve your problem.

Came here to say this. I have an NC2 and was absolutely unwilling to buy an NC1 for any price.

You aren’t necessarily being reckless, but you aren’t following the law.

Stay right except to pass or let someone merge. The left lane is not for what you subjectively consider fast!

Converting to manual brakes has its advantages, but I don’t think that’s something I’d want on a street car personally. If it was a dedicated track car, sure. I also find that I don’t really like manual brakes during autocross either, the inputs just need to be so quick that it’s kind of tough.

The thing is the turbos themselves have come a long long way. The E46 M3 didn’t have turbos because the turbos in the late 90s sucked. Specifically, modern bearings and variable geometry make them so much more responsive.

Yup, we call that “brake modulation” and on track cars that largely comes from the ability to use larger brake masters, lower mu pads, and stiffer calipers that all come with the multi-piston monoblocks. I sort of referred to this off hand when talking about how road cars actually are not set up for what real racing brakes require. In a race car you’ll actually find the pedals are pretty stiff and require a *lot* of effort, because it’s easier to modulate when the force spectrum is say 0-100 lbs as opposed to 0-20.

Hi, big brake and racecar dork here. I feel compelled to add to this because I feel like the top answers are missing a degree of complexity in this.

While yes, in general, multi-piston calipers are going to provide more stopping power, it’s not quite as simple as heavier cars = need more brakes, therefore more pistons more brakes! My 3/4 ton pickup is heavier than any passenger car save maybe a model Y or a wagoneer, yet it has simply huge single piston brakes that will happily lock the tires up.

Brake torque is a function of pad mu, piston area, brake diameter, and the pressure generated by the master cylinder. The main advantage of multi-piston brakes is that you can more efficiently utilize the pad area for pistons. This leads to more even pad wear and more piston area for a given caliper size/diameter than you would otherwise manage. They are also much stiffer than single-piston calipers.

So, I have a couple of theories, as it’s hard to know exactly what decisions are being made behind closed doors.

First, for a given brake size and diameter, more piston area does improve the amount of brake torque generated per pedal effort at a given master cylinder size. I acknowledge that this is restating the whole “stops better” idea in a much more convoluted way; however I think part of the motivation is that at some point larger brakes get very heavy and unsprung weight is pretty awful for mileage and performance. Multi-piston brakes let them hit brake torque and feel targets without going with huge brakes.

Second, I think the feel aspect is likely the larger motivation. Like I said, you can spec huge single piston brakes that will absolutely still lock the tires up, but they won’t feel very good, and they’ll need a bunch of pedal effort due to the smaller piston area. Consumers of performance road cars simply don’t know much about what makes good brakes, and so the brakes feeling “grabby” is what they think good brakes feel like. Lots of piston area creates grabby brakes with short pedal travel without a ton of effort - this is the key thing in my estimation. The stiffer calipers also contribute to a stiffer and more confident pedal.

Finally, I really don’t think you should underestimate the appeal of big performance brakes under nice wheels. It’s one of the most obvious signals of a “performance” car, especially luxury cars that want to communicate fast but not overly flashy. That might be my bias, but I think that’s something people absolutely pick up on and it influences their opinion on the appearance.