You do have a point and I agree with you. It realy shouldnt fail like this but there could be a lot of reasons behind that. It could be a defected piece, Flaw in the design like you said, weather conditions or may be thats how much they are suppose to last cause you have to either replace or wash your air filter after a certain amount of time.

Iam not against you in any way but the point is no one ever claimed or shared any information about how long they last or if it ever failed whitin the time they owned their car.

Dont get me wrong but you are the first and only one so far to have this problem and I know its not like you dont know anything but it could be just badluck or defected item, or something else.

I searched some more forums and couldnt find any posts with the same type of problems yet but will definitly do some research cause this realy is important