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Im a college student with limited finds and saved up for a nice DP and VB. Ill keep it short and simple - A tuner makes your truck work harder (80hp .. 120...smoke...race..) so therefore putting more stress on different components and causing more problems or decreasing the lifetime of the engine or its components. I cant afford a whole lot of repairs, Its no doubt to me that a tuner makes your injectors work harder and they will need to be replaced much sooner. Am i wrong? Someone convince me to by a tuner!! Like my uncle says about tuners " i need my truck to last, not go fast!"
Quite a few people buy chips and put just as many trouble free miles on their trucks as people who don't. It's all about how you drive. Abuse a stock truck, and it will break. Abuse a modified truck, and it will also break.... sometimes much quicker.
If you drive a chipped truck nice and easy, you aren't stressing anything out of the ordinary.
Curtis has a good point. You could also get live tuning, which will set your tunes to your truck (all trucks run differently), which will make it run more efficient. Maybe even more efficient than in stock form.
There's a guy out there with almost 700k on a stock-bottom end 02. He's running a BTS chip and tranny, a BB garrett, and third set of injectors, but he tows campers and he's been chipped a long time (Highway prisoner). Also im sure Solid Ground's trucks have SOMETHING done to them.
I am probably the worst person to respond to this post because I do not drive my truck frequently, or daily. When I do, after it warms up the chip gets switched and I flog it. That is why I have yet to get a decent useful MPG estimate since my turbo and injector install. I will say this, I am well over 200 miles on the current tank and still above half a tank.
As for longevity, well, I can keep it real and drive like I have some common sense or I can flog it and take my chances. I feel pretty good flogging mine when I do due to my setup and tuning. With stock turbo and injectors I think you can damage the tranny before the motor due to it's flaws until corrected.
That is, unless you get silly and ignore the pyro with the stock turbo. I have almost become bored checking my pyro these days. We'll see how it does with the boat if I ever get my pool installed. I doubt it will change much since pulling Jeremy's truck really presented no issues either. Of course that was at 50mph as any faster and it became unstable.
Wow, Bottom line, you should be fine like Curtis said. The injectors are good for whatever the stock HPOP can throw at them