How long should a turbo last?

New Isx turbos are known to fail quickly. I know a guy who replaced 3 in one year

 

Ha!! You sure it is turbo and not the engine slobbering oil through the manifold??

 

I have my original ISX turbo , over 1 million miles , 2006 engine

 

As a side question, what are they doing to turbos these days?

I have never lost a turbo no matter how many miles on a rig, and there were a few past one million in my time. Not that they were any good to drive sounding like a crate of parts scattering all over the road...

 

I have had diesel engines weep oil out of the turbo if I idled a lot (this was before they had apu's).

 

I had a borg warner turbo on my single turbo C15 that failed with probably only 250,000 maybe 300,000 miles on it. I take care of my truck too and change the oil every 12,000 miles. CAT had inframed it 100,000 miles prior to the failure and they checked the endplay at that time and it was fine. I thought that was way too soon for it to grenade like that. When I was a company driver I ran several trucks up to 500,000 miles before they were traded off and they never blew a turbo. I know people who have put over a million miles on turbos and only changed them because they feared it might happen. Who knows why these things happen I guess we're just lucky?