Holy crap, you have 161,000 miles on your car? That's amazing.
Yes I have a real and now 163,???k on the car. While I am finishing my doctorate I took a job doing accident photography which really didn't require any level of thought or time like the IT stuff did. I was at Wachovia doing enterprise network support and I was on call 24/7 and the papers I have to write for these classes are crazy like 5500-7500 words twice a week. So I still needed income and lucked upon this photography job. I literally drive around and take pictures of people's cars, intersections, boats, personal property, and personal injury stuff. I cover about 100 miles around Raleigh and drive about 6k a month. I have had a couple of mounts that were over 7500 but that's rare and normally when I'm covering someone else territory in addition to my own.
I finally did have something break. The weather stripping that goes up and down beside the passenger side windshield blew off the car sometime after I upgraded to stage 1. I replaced it Friday after I noticed it.
My thoughts on why I havnt had any problems might stem from a couple of things.
1. When I first bought the car I properly broke it in by not dogging the car letting the rings seal.
2. I used normal oil for the first 3 oil changes before going to synthetic allowing the thicker oil to properly collect the new metal shavings before going to a synthetic.we use a magnet at the drain pan to help collect that stuff.
3. The car does not sit. I may not drive it every Saturday and every Sunday but more than likely it will be driven at least on of those days. And during the week it never sees less than 200 miles a day.
4. Oil changes happen every 2000-2500 miles and is synthetic.
5. Transmission fluid is changed every 35,000
6. At 100,000 I did the coolant, tranny, plugs
I think that's it. Oh yeah during the first 100,000 the air filter got swapped twice. I figured it really didn't matter because I was swapping the oil so frequently and it really was never that dirty.
And the miles are a 50/50 split between highway and city.