Reliability
The UK’s most reliable used cars, according to MOT results
Which used cars pass their MOT first time most often? We compared first-time pass rates by model and age, adjusting for the fact that older cars fail more.
Preview story. The figures here are illustrative demo data, not official statistics.
- 71.6% of cars pass their MOT first time
- 88.6% pass rate at 3 years old
- 62.5% pass rate at 15 years and older
A raw MOT pass rate mostly tells you how old a model’s cars are. A model that stopped being sold ten years ago will look unreliable next to one launched last year, whatever its build quality.
To compare fairly, we group every car MOT test by the vehicle’s age at the time of the test, then compare each model with the national pass rate for cars of the same age. A model that beats its age group consistently, across several age bands and thousands of tests, is doing something right.
How pass rates fall with age
Across all cars, the first-time pass rate falls steadily with age. Three-year-old cars, at their first MOT, pass 88.6% of the time. By ten years the figure is 70.2%, and cars aged 15 or more pass 62.5% of their tests.
The most common reasons for failure are the same at every age: lamps and electrical equipment, suspension, brakes and tyres. What changes is how often they appear. Corrosion and emissions failures become more common as cars pass ten years old.
What we count
- First-time pass: the vehicle passed its first test of the MOT cycle, with no retest.
- Normal tests only: we exclude retests, abandoned and aborted tests.
- Minimum sample: a model needs at least 1,000 tests in an age band before we publish its rate for that band.
The full method, including how we match DVSA make and model names, is on our methodology page.