Touareg brake check

Since I have my workshop, it has been easy to work on my cars.  There is a lot of room to move around.   I have no worries of anyone having issues with me making noise or fumes or anything that goes with working on cars of any kind.  With that I put my Touareg on jack stands to check the brakes.  I have had the "check the brake pads" message on my dash for some time now.  So I wanted to check them to see which is the culprit for the message.  So  here is the Egg up on the jack stands.

After inspecting the brakes at all corners, I determined that the rear driver side was the brake that was causing the message.  I found the wire broken on the inside pad.  The outside was not broken but starting to wear through the insulation of the wire.  You can see the exposed wire of the outside pad sensor in the picture below.

Once I reconnected the broken wire from the inside pad, the message did not return.  I am assuming that grounding the wire does not prompt the message but an open circuit does.  Anyway,  since the outside pad sensor was wearing through the insulation and it was a matter of a little time before it would trip the worn pad warning message, I did not reinstall the sensor.  You can see that I zip tied it to the brake line to keep it out of the way.

There is still plenty of pad left on that side even though it tripped the sensor.  Also the rear brakes wear slower than the front.  I also have new rear brakes already in the shop.  So I will wait until the brakes are all the way worn out then replace to maximize the money.

As long as I can check the brakes this easily, I will take them until just about metal.