@Mike N maybe you can weigh in on something my mechanic says about newer cars. He hates the newer turbo engines. Something about too much compression making the lifespan shorter. He advises looking for models without turbo when shopping, and surprised me by looking online and finding and recommending a hybrid with a non turbo engine and saying “I would recommend this over their other models.”
Do you feel the same about turbo in general? At this point in life, I am a pretty tame driver. 99.9% of my driving is below 4000rpm, and most of it is 2-2500rpm
I'm not Mike N, but my take on this is as follows:
How turbocharging works is to increase the
brake mean effective pressure in the cylinders, thus increasing horsepower and torque from a smaller engine. Unavoidably, then, the loads on the bearings and piston rings will be higher for a given power output in a turbo or supercharged engine. Now, of course, the manufacturers increase the capacity of those elements in turbo engines, as well as providing extra cooling. Under normal loading, the average turbo engine can be expected to last as long as anyone would reasonably expect: let's say 20 years and 200,000 miles of "ordinary service". However - and here we move to speculation - I would expect that, if you look at engine life versus number of cars as a bell curve distribution, there'll be a "fatter left tail" of engines that wear out or fail earlier, amongst forced induction engines compared to normally aspirated.
Three other points about long term durability, though:
1) Every engine design, and every application, has weak points. So even though one can say something about an overall type of design, what's a lot more important is the detailed execution of it. That's where the scuttlebutt/grapevine/mechanic's experience comes in.
2) Long term durability is not the same thing as reliability. What really torques you off is when the thing spends five days every month in the shop. That's reliabilty, not long term durability, and I would expect that forced induction versus normally aspirated is much more a matter of long term durability. Sure, if the engine in your car wears out at 150,000 miles (those of us with hairy ears remember when that was only a fantasy for most), and your previous one went 300,000, you'll be disappointed, but it'll have taken you years to get there. It's the repeated incidents when the damn thing won't start for the tenth time, or the twentieth check engine light, that make you want to leave the thing in front of the dealer with the hood up and a sign "THIS CAR IS A LEMON".
3) And I'd bet that engine wear-out is almost never the cause of scrapping a car these days. Rust-out in the North, embrittlement and failure of plastic parts in the South, ancillary engine components all reaching end of life one after the other, inadequately shielded electronics becoming unreliable, big suspension or exhaust or fuel system bills, interior falling apart, inability to pass emissions check with consequent enormous repair costs - these are the things that are causing people to give up on an older car. I bet fewer than 10% of the unwrecked cars that go to scrap actually have worn out bearings, or cams worn flat, or broken or worn out piston rings, or burnt valves, and most of the ones that do have worn-out engines are due to owners who refuse to do periodic maintenance.
So personally, for a daily driver, I wouldn't be particularly scared of a turbo charged engine from a manufacturer with a good overall reliability record, but I'd just be aware that the possibility of shorter life is higher than with an all-things-equivalent normally aspirated engine.
Now if you want me to compare a Toyota with turbo to a Chrysler NA engine - no comparison - I'll take the Toyota.
), our labor guide only allows 4 hours and we only cover $95 an hour labor, versus the $150+ that most shops are currently charging.
