Unless you’re a professional athlete with tree trunks for legs, be grateful that your car has a brake booster nestled between the brake master cylinder and firewall on your car. Your brake booster doesn’t make any noise, and it doesn’t use any electricity or gasoline, but it ensures that you can stop your car with only a light touch of the brake pedal. Things weren’t always like that: before the invention of the vacuum brake booster, cars still stopped. It’s just that you had to really stomp on the brake pedal. The modern brake booster is an ingenious device that operates using something that your engine generates whenever it’s running: vacuum. The brake booster takes engine vacuum via a rubber hose that runs from the intake manifold, and the brake booster uses that vacuum to amplify the pressure you put on the pedal. A light application of the brakes is translated by the brake booster into significantly more pressure on the brake master cylinder, ensuring that your car stops quickly. So what happens to the brake booster if your car stalls, resulting in a loss of engine vacuum? Early designers realized that gas engines were hardly foolproof, so they designed a little check valve into the brake booster circuit. The brake booster stores enough vacuum to provide full boost for two or three pedal applications even after the engine dies. The check valve on the brake booster is what keeps that vacuum from leaking out. And speaking of leaks, that’s the reason most brake booster units have to be replaced. As your brake booster ages, the rubber seals and diaphragms that hold the vacuum tend to wear out and crack. If the brake booster can’t hold vacuum (despite the check valve’s best efforts), its time is up and you’ll need a new or remanufactured new brake booster.