I've been of the persuasion of breaking in the car like how it will be driven, ie. if the car will be driven hard, break-it in hard. Only thing that I try to do is not maintain a constant cruise for very long - try to vary the RPMs as much as possible, do a couple of strong pulls to redline, once the engine is fully up to temperature. My 2002 Corolla, 2003 Matrix, and 2009 Matrix - I drove the nuts off the cars the first 500 miles, then did a quick oil and filter change at 1000 miles. Corolla has 205K miles, 2003 Matrix had 120K miles before it was rear-ended, 2009 Matrix has 90K miles on the clock. Not one of them had any engine or powertrain issues - none have burned any significant amount of oil between oil changes (the 1ZZ-FE in the 2002 Corolla and the 2AZ-FE in the 2009 Matrix are known heavy oil consumers). The 2009 RAV4 - drove that one gently, as it was my first "new" AWD vehicle - didn't know what to expect. So far - seems OK - but doesn't seem to run as nicely as the others. For some reasons, seems to be "looser" than the others, doesn't seem to make all the power it should. The new 2016 RAV4 - going to run the nuts off of this one - compare it to the 2009 RAV4. One thing I noticed right away - steady increases to fuel economy as the miles are rolling on, even after I dropped tire pressures (originally at 51PSI!!!). Not sure if this is because I'm getting used to driving it (rides much smoother than the other RAV4 - less truckish). Or due to winding the engine through the RPM range during the break in process. Got almost 2K miles in the 4 weeks I've had it - ready to hand off to my wife as her new daily soon.