brakes are important

I have the Wikihow RSS feed on my google home page, and often the articles are kind of pointless. But this one struck me as one a person might actually want to read and memorize for use someday. A friend of mine was once driving down a fairly steep hill in a residential neighborhood in Monterey in an ancient car, which she hadn't had very long - she'd just learned to drive - when she discovered her brakes were not as interested in stopping at a four-way stop as she was. So she decided to hang a right at the corner, but unfortunately there was a car there. Oops. Good thing nobody was moving very fast.