Is life expectancy related to type of usage? Urban driving with innumerable gear changes will cause a lot more wear to everything in the drivetrain compared to out-of-town driving with far fewer gear changes.
Agree, that is the same problem as with normal manual gearbox bearing failures on GD, my wife did short journeys in her GD, my mileage was always long distance commuting on good A and B roads. The cars were identical 53 plate 1.4 and her gearbox got so noisy at around 80K that it had to be fixed, my gearbox was till fine at 120K when it got traded in. They both had gearbox molyslip in, and I am sure that without it my wifes bearing would have failed sooner because she did a lot more low gear mileage than I did, putting more strain on the bearing.
There is a lot of sense in the 'motorway miles' being better for a car than local mileage. High mileage does not hurt modern cars, in fact I am wary of cars that have done only small annual mileages as being potentially more liable to give problems.
