Touring Equipment

"No joke, Andy, but we have never had a hub fail, so we can’t tell you the service life, but some of our customers have covered 70,000km of world travel" was the reply from the product manager, Carsten Geck. (Rohloff still claim never to have had a hub fail and the greatest distance claimed for a Rohloff hub was 145,000km by Thomas Longin in May 2009)

This seems to me to be not entirely true.

Ninety percent of serious cycle tourers have one. It adds almost a thousand pounds to the cost of the bike and has been on the market for twelve years. Rumour had it there has never been a mechanical failure. It is revered, respected, allegedly indestructible and is a very complex feat of German engineering.

It felt like a small puncture. I looked back. Tyre looked OK. Then I noticed the spoke flapping in the breeze. A broken spoke could easily be replaced but on closer inspection I saw the real extent of the problem. Inexplicably a piece of metal had spontaneously fallen off the Rohloff shell, the part where the spokes attach to. There was no way I could re-attach the spoke by the road and by the look of it I would need a new hub and with it I would have to deal with a whole world of problems.

...

Word came that Santos and Rohloff had teamed up to ship a whole new wheel and hub to Khartoum. I have since learned that the incidence of this type of hub failure is approximately one in five thousand.

from http://cyclingthe6.blogspot.com/2010/12/nubian-way.html

So whilst a great hub, trying to claim they have never had a hub fail is foolish.