Which wears down brake pads more: sudden or gradual braking? Common sense would suggest that sudden braking is worse than gradual braking.
On the other hand, a basic physics-based analysis would seem to indicate that the two cases would cause the same wear to the brake pads.  After all, if a car (or bike, etc.) travelling at speed $v$ needs to come to a stop, then the energy dissipated by the brakes is $\frac{1}{2}mv^2$ regardless of how suddenly or gradually braking was applied.
But that ignores the actual "microscopic" mechanism of how the brakes work.  Could an argument be made that even though the energy is the same, sudden braking cases more wear?

Note In a real life situation sudden braking can cause wear and tear on other parts of the car, but we're only talking about brake pads here.  Also, ignore the effects of wind and rolling resistance, or assume they are the same in either case
 A: From the perspective of both forces and power, sudden braking causes more wear even if the energy/work is the same because everything occurs over a shorter period of time.
Higher instantaneous forces results in more stress and and higher power result in higher temperatures, therefore sudden braking causes more wear.
A: It is difficult to ignore the physical effects because in modern systems there is disk brake system aand on pressing the brakes suddenly the car would start sliding and therefore tyre will wear down instead of breaks and in case of slowly braking the breakpads have to rub them to provide friction for the car to stop.
but if you ignore this effect completely then I suppose that the temperature increased or heat generated plays the difference in both of these processes as for instantaneous braking, temperature will increase and absorbed by the tyre and as the temperature increases rapidly the rate of absorption increases and net heat absorbed is more than that in the case of slow braking although heat evolved is same.
So increased temperature of body increases its tendency to break down intermolecular bonds as on increasing temperature activation energy decreases.
