DW: Still better than a Yugo.
A man in Germany bought a used Mercedes luxury SUV at an auction and quickly discovered something was very wrong with the brakes. When he tried to slow down, the car barely stopped, no matter how hard he pressed the brake pedal. He had the vehicle towed to a repair shop, where mechanics found wooden blocks instead of actual brake pads. Someone had carved pieces of wood to look like brake pads and even wrote "Brembo," a real brake pad brand name, on them in permanent marker.
The fake pads offered almost no stopping power and had already damaged the metal disks. A safety expert called it "criminal sloppiness" and said the wood wears out immediately and can't stop a vehicle weighing two tons. German police opened a criminal case against the previous owner for messing with the car's safety equipment, but so far nobody knows why they did it.
Source: Oddity Central