The key phrase is 'mechanical sympathy'.

I've once managed to 'glaze' a clutch, in horrible stop-start driving on the M62, heading up Saddleworth from rochdale.

Apart from that, I've done probably in excess of a million miles in the last 30 years, and never broken anything. I took an Audi A6 2.5 diesel (clutch and DMF) from 0 to 147k miles in about 3 years without anything going wrong with it, the clutch biting point felt as good on the last day as on the first.

In contrast, I know of someone who managed to kill a clutch in about 5k miles. They claimed it must have been faulty - and then killed the replacement in about 6k miles.

My mum has a habit of going through clutches quite quickly, say 20-30,000 miles, and I took the opportunity to jump in her car with her one day.

Apart from it being a generally scary experience, I noticed that she rode the clutch a lot, especially in traffic and when at uphill junctions; she also slipped the clutch to gain momentum when driving too slowly for that gear.

I have been a bit unsympathetic with mine in the past - I've had my car for 15 years and it's now adjusted the point of it not being adjusted any more, so it's clearly on it's last legs. The traffic light GPs have reduced significantly and I have owned the car from 46,000 miles to the current 232,000 without ever having to change the clutch. For all I know, it may be the original!

When I hear clutches needing replacement before 50,000 miles, I'm always a bit sceptical about how the car has been driven. Replacement clutches can vary in their quality and OE items are expensive.

A few months ago I started experiencing what appeared to be a very noticeable clutch judder on my A3 1.4TFSI. It became very difficult to pull away cleanly and I was very disappointed as the car had only done about 26,000 miles at the time and worried that I would need to have the clutch replaced. It was most noticeable when attempting to pull away while the engine was cold.

I had been running the car almost exclusively on Shell V-power unleaded for some time. However, when the price started creeping up a bit, I switched to the standard Shell unleaded and, almost immediately, the juddering went away. After a couple of tanks of normal unleaded, I tried some V-Power again and the juddering came back. Switched back to standard unleaded and it stopped again.

Since then I've stuck with standard unleaded and it's been fine as well as saving money. I'm not sure what was happening, maybe it's an engine management issue, but I've not seen any other reports of similar happenings. At least the clutch appears to be OK.

I've never had to replace a clutch in any of the manual cars I've owned. I've heard of slipping clutches, so maybe I've been lucky, or perhaps it's mecahnical sympathy.

My manual cars were:

1980 (W Reg) Ford Cortina 1.6. I think I took that from around 50k miles when I bought it to just over 100k miles when I sold it.

1985 Ford Sierra 1.8. I took that from around 30k when I bought it to around 95k when I sold it.

1990 Toyota MR2 2.0. I had that from new up to about 150k miles.

I've had autos after that, although I occasionally drive my daughter's manual Fiat 500 1.4, which is at 55k miles and not showing any clutch problems.

I'm sure clutches do wear, but it seems to be one of those things that may happen once in a car's lifetime if that. But I'm sure that how you drive it has a lot to do with the clutch lifetime.

It may also be a factor that all of my manual cars have been NA petrols.

It may be interesting to ask taxi drivers. They will probably do enough milage in any given car to tell you how long a clutch lasts, and a lot of their milage will be around town where there's a lot of clutch usage.

only ever experienced one car which needed a new clutch, back in the early 80's, Datsun Cherry .... yours truly and 2 brothers had learnt to drive on this car so 3 teenagers managed to wear it down to an early replacement ..... must have learnt well, previous car reached 172k, current car on 185k, various other cars in between, all on original clutch.