Did you have an "XR3i girl" to go with the Car IO540
Seriously though, engines these days have come on leaps and bounds over the old 1980's ones. I had the Sierra XR4i (without the girl) and it was brilliant...However, it did eventually die, just before going into the Dartford Tunnel with serious amounts of smoke and flames under the bonnet as the engine seized up! But saying that, it was almost 20 years old at the time and the only thing that I did differently was change the oil a few weeks before. Had I left the oil alone it would probably have been ok!
I think that there are numerous "partial" engine failure in aeroplanes, cracked cylinder heads etc., and you get far less of them in a modern, liquid cooled, car engine. The taxi driver I use to get to LHR drives his diesel Citroens up to 350,000 miles before changing the car and even with those miles on the clock, the thing still sounds as good as new and he rarely has any
engine problems. At an average speed of 50 mph (which is quite high average) that equates to 7000 hours.