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As an engineer, I'm sure there is no way you would've argued to keep something a little bit more expensive and possibly slightly heavier if it meant the result was engineering for 250k miles instead of the 125k expected life of the vehicle.
If only it were that simple. Product release engineers have multiple constraints [[performance, mass, piece cost, squeak & rattle, etc.) that their design must satisfy before it ever gets to the physical validation part of the design process where life-cycle testing takes place. Mileage isn't a product design life target, cycles of operation are. The product design and validation process is an iterative one whereby the final result is an optimized design that usually meets all of the imposed constriants.