Never looked under the hood on this car have you?
I WISH there were a Toyota engine under the hood.
A nice straight 4 or V6 Toyota engine under the hood would be nice.
The reliability of the direct injection is going to play a bit part in how long-lived this engine design turns out to be. It is so new that they still have not managed to figure out what causes the crickets! So they are still learning.
The engine needs to be wound out to get any recreational acceleration. Should be interesting to see how this plays a role. My normal shift points are over 5500 rpm and cruise is 3-3500 rpm. Hitting the rev limiter is not an unheard of event.
Another "internet issue" floating around is that a failure of the injector seals seems to be a death sentence for this engine. "If you smell fuel it's too late". If that should turn out to be an issue as the cars age, then it will taint the perception for the entire engine design.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the engine is quite complex from the start. It has way too many cams spread all over the place. Why does a 4 cylinder engine need four cams, two heads and twice the cam-gear as a normal engine? Engineers have a word for such over-complicated desgns they call them a "Kludge". Spark Plugs are a nightmare to replace. I can see a lot of them getting stuck in the heads with a repair cost exceeding the value of a 8 year old car. Also as the cars get older, people will be skipping on maintenance, and that is when complexity takes its toll: Not that the engine is a "bad design", more like it won't survive second and third owners.
In the meantime, I will just keep driving mine. I only need it to last about 150,000 km over ten years. So far, so good.