With my modern car coming up for a service i found my first bit of "modern cars are hard to work on".
The rear pads need replacing and it has an electronic parking brake, which i though nothing of. Just happened to see it mentioned in an owners forum when trying to confirm the correct part number.
With EPB's you can't just use a C clamp to wind the caliper in, it will damage the mechanism, so you need to tell the ECU to wind them in. Which you can't do through the built in car controls (should be in there!). So instead you need diagnostics software and cable which costs around £300
You then need to have the software wind the caliper back in and also program in the depth of the new pads.
The reason i take issue is that a lot people and places won't get the expensive software (compared to the cost of £35 pads, you need to spend £300) and instead just damage the mechanism which can also lead to the mechanism not engaging, therefore no rear brakes. A lot of these cars have auto hill start which means you will expect it to come on and then without knowing, you end up in a position where you're not expecting the car to roll back, but it does.
When it comes to safety like this and it needing to be done meticulously, i think it's a bit irresponsible of manufacturers to not allow access to a simple feature from within the cars interface. You can already check the oil level, change the driving style etc. so a safety feature like this should have the extra option to do something simple as wind the brake system in for a pad change. Considering how many hack video's i've seen there's a safety issue out there which is done because of the omission of a simple function, which means it's far too expensive to do properly, therefore hacks being done.
*steps down from soap box*
Waste of time and money! Also makes it dangerous as now i'll be ignoring pad warnings.