Vehicle Reliability Test

We wanted to do a test to find out which vehicles have stood the test of time + wear and tear. We thought a good way to do this was to create a test based on high mileage vehicles that match the following rules:

• Are 10 years or older.
• Have done 100,000 miles or more.
• Do not have mileage discrepancies or odd looking mileage.

We think the active MOT rate gives a good indicator of reliability, this basically means vehicles that still have an in-date MOT (at the time of test start – 15th December 2019). We think this works well as an indicator because, vehicles in the UK are legally required to have a valid MOT if they are to be used on public roads.

We tested a total of 617,231 vehicles that had passed the mileage discrepancies test, we then removed a further 2646 vehicles that looked like they may have had mileage errors (e.g. typo), this gave us a total of 614,585 vehicles for this test, that have done 100,000 miles or more and are older than 10 years.

We also filtered out any vehicles that had less than 5000 total checked as we think less than 5000 checks is not enough data.

Makes & Models List

MAKE AND MODEL	TOTAL CHECKED	MOT (ACTIVE)	MOT RATE (ACTIVE)	AVG MILEAGE (ACTIVE)	DIESEL FUELTYPE (ACTIVE)
VOLKSWAGEN TRANSPORTER	5587	5045	90.29%	153,089	99.48%
VAUXHALL INSIGNIA	5395	4272	79.18%	127,406	92.34%
AUDI A3	16270	12763	78.44%	135,069	80.41%
MINI MINI	7907	6166	77.98%	120,663	18.73%
VAUXHALL VIVARO	5069	3913	77.19%	143,534	100%
FORD FIESTA	12715	9252	72.76%	122,989	41.73%
HONDA CIVIC	8313	5978	71.91%	129,286	34.44%
VOLKSWAGEN GOLF	31367	22392	71.38%	136,232	71.42%
SEAT LEON	5668	3978	70.18%	130,622	75.79%
VOLKSWAGEN POLO	7555	5266	69.70%	124,035	32.83%
AUDI A4	18431	12768	69.27%	141,565	80.92%
AUDI A6	7626	5263	69.01%	145,933	93.69%
BMW 3 SERIES	27282	18689	68.50%	136,149	70.18%
FORD TRANSIT	19944	13475	67.56%	148,450	100%
MERCEDES-BENZ SPRINTER	5535	3640	65.76%	178,259	100%
VAUXHALL ASTRA	21599	13639	63.14%	127,467	47.05%
FORD FOCUS	22231	14001	62.97%	127,245	47.80%
SKODA OCTAVIA	6104	3789	62.07%	150,247	87.56%
VAUXHALL CORSA	9799	6073	61.97%	119,932	35.12%
VAUXHALL ZAFIRA	9178	5671	61.78%	127,120	43.43%
VOLKSWAGEN PASSAT	17058	9914	58.11%	148,568	95.87%
FORD MONDEO	15488	8521	55.01%	140,938	83.78%
RENAULT CLIO	5413	2886	53.31%	120,780	30.90%
VAUXHALL VECTRA	9573	3944	41.19%	137,018	57.09%

Explanation of above data:

• Make and Model – The vehicle make and model.
• Total Checked – How many were checked in total (including valid and expired MOT’s)
• MOT (ACTIVE) – The amount of vehicles that have a valid and active MOT (at the time of test start – 15th December 2019).
• MOT Rate (ACTIVE) – The percentage with an active MOT ( at the time of test start – 15th December 2019).
• AVG Mileage (ACTIVE) – The average overall mileage that have an active/valid MOT – Worked out from last MOT mileage record of all vehicles then averaged ( at the time of test start – 15th December 2019).
• Diesel Fueltype (ACTIVE) – The percentage of vehicles that were deisel and have an active/valid MOT (at the time of test start – 15th December 2019).

More information about this data

How did we perform this test?

We used the gov.uk MOT API and a large list of vehicle registrations. We then used custom software to create a target list that matched our requirements: over 100,000 miles and 10+ years old. We removed any vehicles that had mileage discrepancies or odd looking mileage.