Quote Originally Posted by Chopper
When your pedal goes to the floor and nothing happens....early E-Brakes grabbed the driveshaft itself.
My dad told me about the e-brakes on the giant diesel-electric mining dump trucks. Regular braking was done by running the wheel motors backwards and heating up a big toaster-like resistor bank with the generated electricity. If they ever had to use the friction emergency brakes (I think he called them 'service brakes'), they would more or less burn out after one and only one use.

If you did a panic stop in something that large, you pretty much wrote it off and left it by the side of the road until you could go back and do a brake job on it.