I get the impression that these engines wear out quickly

[1JB]

Originally Posted by YellowJacket

No, IMS is not "rear main seal." IMS is "intermediate shaft." RMS failure generally means a couple dots of oil on the garage floor and a day's labor for a new seal (if dealt with in a reasonable amount of time). IMS failure is the more serious "catastrophic engine failure" people refer to.

My bad thanks for the correction. Thought the IMS was a typo in Brucelee's post. I've seen "intermediate shaft" referenced but not IMS so I assume RMS. Nice in a post that's about not making assumptions eh!

[Pat]

Ahhh...now I understand, thank you.
I glanced at the first page of that link. The average owner there has maybe 50K miles on their cars. That doesn't really do much for me regarding longevity.
Maybe I just found a few unrepresentative posts and extrapolated from there without using a significant sample size.

Thanks though. All that really matters is that these engines should have no problem going a few hundred thousand miles assuming proper maintenance. That's what I care about, because I planning on driving it 20K miles per year.

[1JB]

Make no mistake although overall these engines should go for well over 100M miles if they do have a big problem like the intermediate shaft failure and it's out of warranty it will cost you an arm, leg and your first born. Although failures like that are out there they are no where near something like the failure rates on the early Acura MDX transmissions for example.

[Brucelee]

We don't know how many Porsche engines fail prematurely and Porsche is certainly not going to issue any data.

Anecdotely, there are more than a few IMS failures in the 1997 and on engines.