Not always the case, as I used standard pagids on my remapped Audi A6 quattro, the brake dust was black on black alloys and VERY noticeable, I changed to EBC red stuff, which was a lighter coloured compound but probably produced a 10th of the amount of visible dust as to be unnoticeable.

 

Your "Not always the case ..." conclusion is incorrect because you quoted only half of my first paragraph and then took what I wrote out of context. What you omitted was: "All brake pads are sacrificial and give their lives to save yours. Friction causes brakes to stop your car and every time you step on the brake pedal a little bit of pad rubs off as brake dust. Softer pad compounds produce more dust than harder compounds. ..."

What I said is always the case. Your EBC Red Stuff pads produced less dust because they're a harder compound than the Pagid pads.

Yes, dull black dust on gloss black wheels will be very noticeable. The same black dust on silver wheels will be even more noticeable.

 

Some pads even though they all dust, it is even on the wheel and not so bad looking. I wonder if that is solely the pad or the engineering of how the dust is moved from the brakes and wheel?

 

Not really anything to do with engineering, other than the compound design.
I don't know of any pad manufacturer that sets out to make a 'low dusting pad' because if they did, you could buy them.
As Stuart correctly points out, dusting is a byproduct of any compound, but if a pad producted no dust, it would be worthless. Might as well set two slabs of granite down there. Your rims stay clean, all the way as you plow into the stopped car in front of you! Not to mention eating rotors in a week (But hey! Metal shavings don't count as dust!).
Also, I support Stuarts assessment of ceramic being a lighter color, which is not as visible as higher performance pads. There is a caveat though, and that is that there is no mandated standard as to how much of the pad must contain ceramic, to be called Ceramic. Theoretically you could have a high volume of organic, with less than 10% ceramic material, and still sell the product as a ceramic pad. (hence some of you have seen darker 'ceramic' dust.

 

 

The engineering by the car manufacturer to move the brake dust away from the wheel. My Lotus had very large AP Racing rotors that gripped like no body's business yet took a lot of driving show dust. I believe they better engineered how air management moved dust away from the wheel (or via keeping the disk cooler).

 

Nope I got you, but by percentages you get 90% less brake dust but not 90% less brake performance, in fact in some cases it's improved in all areas excepting 'initial bite'. When I upgraded my X100 and upgraded to SS lines (albeit on a car that was already 14yrs old) the improvement was startling. For the initial bite I didn't have to alter my driving style much....as a set of pads usually lasted me 40k miles

 

Gottcha... Sorry, I was talking pad compounds, not brake system designs.
The few Lotus I've studied have ducted air feeding the front rotors, and this high pressure air entering the inside wheel well would indeed keep things cleaner. (My Lexus had a similar design).

V