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I spent a bit of time in the lawn and garden industry. Every machine has a design life and all the major components are made to that design life. The company I worked for made hydrostatic transaxles for riders and transaxles for walk-behind mowers.
The John Deere riders you can get at Home Depot and other big box stores had a design life of 250 hours. Deere calculated that to be 10 years. Because their design life was only 250 hours they had us remove the drain plugs from their version of the transaxle because their manual said the transaxle had "lifetime" oil and never needed to be changed and than saved them 25 cents per vehicle. They were correct - the transaxle would go 250 hours without changing the oil even though the best thing you can do for a hydrostat is regular oil changes. The same transaxle was sold to other manufacturers with a 2000 hour life with regular oil and filter changes.
So you could extend the life of the transaxle but that wouldn't really do you a lot of good because the entire machine was made to last 250 hours. We tried to reuse tractors for our testing but other bearings and bushing, and other parts started failing. Even the stamped steel frames would start cracking at 400 - 500 hours even just driving them on a concrete test track. We basically found it wasn't worth trying to reuse them - they were truly disposable lawn tractors.
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