The data
What the MOT data cannot tell you
No roads, no drivers, no garages, no prices, and none of the cars that never turned up. Five silences in 111 million test records — and why 15% of the model-years we hold are deliberately not published.
Articles
One question at a time, answered from DVSA anonymised MOT test data 2023–2025 — not round-ups of other people's advice.
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More articles
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Money
A quarter of MOT failures cost under £50
29 of the 83 failure items we price cost £50 or less to fix, and they are 26% of every failure recorded. The cheapest numbers in the dataset, and the deadline that makes them expensive.
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Roads & repairs
Potholes fail MOTs nine ways
Suspension, tyres and steering are 46% of every failure item recorded in England, Scotland and Wales. A pothole never appears on the sheet — these are the parts that do.
What gets published here
- A claim, not a topic. The headline is the finding. If it could be the title of a garage blog post, it is not a piece we publish.
- The numbers are in the body. Counts, shares and brackets, with the failure items named, so any figure can be checked against the pages it comes from.
- The limits are stated. What the data cannot show is written down next to what it can. Where the piece reasons rather than measures, it says so.
Have a question the data should answer? Send it — the useful ones become pieces.