The source
The DVSA publishes every MOT test carried out in Great Britain as open data, with the registration and anything that could identify an owner removed. Each record includes the make, model, fuel type, engine size, first-use date, mileage, result and the individual items that failed. Our figures use the full 2025 release: 33,075,230 regular MOT tests on cars and light vans (test class 4).
What we count
- Normal tests only. Retests and appeals are excluded, so a car that fails and is retested the same week is counted once, at its first attempt.
- First-time pass means a clean pass. A “pass with rectification at station” (PRS), where a fault was found and fixed during the test, counts as a fail at the first attempt. This matches how the DVSA itself reports first-time pass rates.
- Abandoned and aborted tests are excluded, because they don’t say anything about the car’s condition.
- Age is the test year minus the year the car was first used.
- Failure areas come from the DVSA’s own grouping of test items (brakes, suspension, lights and so on). A test that failed on two brake items counts once for brakes.
Making comparisons fair
Older cars fail more often. Across all cars in 2025 the first-time pass rate fell steadily with age:
| Age | Tests | Passed first time |
|---|---|---|
| 3 years | 1,762,421 | 88% |
| 4 years | 1,826,539 | 87% |
| 5 years | 1,754,787 | 86% |
| 6 years | 2,462,980 | 84% |
| 7 years | 2,468,093 | 81% |
| 8 years | 2,575,302 | 78% |
| 9 years | 2,680,002 | 75% |
| 10 years | 2,572,499 | 72% |
| 11 years | 2,326,282 | 69% |
| 12 years | 2,021,257 | 66% |
| 13 years | 1,709,030 | 63% |
| 14 years | 1,505,341 | 61% |
| 15 years | 1,405,301 | 59% |
| 16 years | 1,212,672 | 58% |
| 17 years | 1,008,117 | 57% |
| 18 years | 917,969 | 57% |
| 19 years | 691,879 | 57% |
| 20 years | 522,456 | 58% |
If we simply ranked models by pass rate, the winners would be whichever models are mostly young. So for every model we work out what the pass rate would be if it performed exactly like the average car at each age, given how many of its tests were at each age. The difference between its real pass rate and that expected figure, in percentage points, is what we rank on.
Which models get a page
Only models with at least 20,000 tests in the year get their own page, and a model needs 3,000 tests within an age group to appear in that group’s rankings. Below that, a handful of unlucky cars can swing the figures. Model names are as recorded at the test. Some newer cars are recorded with their trim level as part of the name (for example “Qashqai Tekna DIG-T MHEV”); where we can’t safely tell which model that is, those tests are counted separately rather than added to the main model, so figures for the newest cars of some models are slightly understated.
What the data cannot tell you
- It measures MOT failures, not breakdowns. Gearbox, clutch and electrical faults that don’t affect the MOT never appear.
- Owners differ. A model popular with careful private owners may look better than one popular with high-mileage fleets, even if they are built equally well.
- It is one year of data. We will update the figures when the DVSA publishes the next release.
- It describes the model, not your car. Always check the individual car’s MOT history before buying.
How this links to the reliability score
The “compared with its age” part of our reliability score uses the national pass rates by age shown above, so each car is judged against what is normal for a car of its age.
Source: DVSA anonymised MOT tests and results, 2025. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.