Not sure I agree with that one. Turbos are hardly new, the benefits of higher compression ratios are new, and generally the design goals of the engine is the b

Not sure I agree with that one. Turbos are hardly new, the benefits of higher compression ratios are new, and generally the design goals of the engine is the biggest part of a change. It used to be that engines were robust. You could turn them off whenever, you could change the oil rarely, and without significant abuse or poor luck they would easily hit 200k miles. MPG wouldn't precipitously drop if you had something on the roof, a trailer, or were speeding. Just look at any manufacturers v6 3 liter for an example. Today's motors are mostly 2 liter 4 cylinder turbos. They are pretty heat sensitive, have CPUs to manage their cooling, and are pretty hard on oil. Even with good maintenance they have a surprisingly high failure rate within the first 100k miles, but often outside of warranty. Look at the decreasing CPO warranties from Subaru, Audi, Lexus, BMW, etc for evidence. These high strung 4 cylinder turbos are efficient within a narrow range, but can often produce surprisingly poor efficiency when towing, putting anything on the roof, or even just speeding. The biggest technological improvement I've seen in cars in the last decade is the transmission. Today's automatics and DCTs are mechanical marvels that exceed the performance and efficiency of manual transmissions. They also largely obviate the problem with the 2 liter turbos that have much narrower power/torque curves than the larger displacement engines of yesterday.