Hyundai found out about this pretty quickly, and de-tuned engine output in later iterations to increase reliability.
Coincidentally, I was recently reading about early American cars and their heavily overbuilt construction is a huge contrast to this "value engineering" of modern engines; whereas those old engines could be tuned to make far more than stock power with little effect on reliability, it seems today the aim is to make the margin as narrow as possible --- just enough to get past the warranty period, with the associated effect that, due to how the statistics work, quite a few of them will fail before too. Samsung's "exploding" washing machines are a recent, non-automotive, example of this.
Today's cars may be more efficient and less polluting, but if they last a fraction of the time as the old ones and have to be replaced many times more often, are they really that much better environmentally overall?
Coincidentally, I was recently reading about early American cars and their heavily overbuilt construction is a huge contrast to this "value engineering" of modern engines; whereas those old engines could be tuned to make far more than stock power with little effect on reliability, it seems today the aim is to make the margin as narrow as possible --- just enough to get past the warranty period, with the associated effect that, due to how the statistics work, quite a few of them will fail before too. Samsung's "exploding" washing machines are a recent, non-automotive, example of this.
Today's cars may be more efficient and less polluting, but if they last a fraction of the time as the old ones and have to be replaced many times more often, are they really that much better environmentally overall?