George, I agree. I'm always skeptical of a vendor that recommends their own services as a "must-have" preventative measure. I've been reading about the R for a couple years now and have not read many blown turbo posts. The JB1/JB4 thread is dozens of pages long, and the other tuning vendors' threads are fairly long as well. If there were an issue with turbos, it would have popped up there.
Coming from the WRX world where tuning is common but blown turbos are not, "Your tuner sucks" was the general response when someone would post that they had their engine tuned and blew a turbo.
I couldn't agree more with both of ya. While there will always be some failures due to the mass manufacturing of any product especially early in any new model run, after all, the early customers are the beta group, whether we're talking about the manufacturers or the tuners modifying them, at this point and time after 3 years of manufacturer revisions and 3 years worth of tuners gathering knowledge, if a tuner is having anywhere near a 20% failure rate, it's the tuner not the product the majority of the time.
The one thing I can say from my experience also having owned a subie product, an sti, that I had dyno tuned 4 times, and never had an issue with but I always spent the $$$ and took it to shops that knew the platform inside and out no matter how far away, is I was always amazed at some of the cars that other customers brought in, obviously modded themselves, did a piss poor job of, had the tuner tune it, then blamed the tuner when it broke. On multiple occasions I watched parts literally fall off cars when on the dyno due to piss poor shade tree mechanics, whether the owner modified it himself or took it to a cheaper place for labor then brings it to a reputable tuner for the tuning, but of course the inevitable mechanical failure was always the tuners fault, I'm really surprised more dyno tuners just don't flat out refuse more customers.
