The Buyer Short Answer
The Ford Fiesta wins this one with room to spare. Across the 2024 public UK MOT record, the Renault Clio posted a
Pass-rate split
This is a proper small-car fight. The Clio and Fiesta have both been default answers for people who want cheap running costs, easy parking and simple servicing. They are also exactly the sort of cars that get bought by first-time drivers, passed around families, run on budgets and then asked to survive another MOT with the bare minimum spent.
The scale matters. The Clio recorded
The Fiesta’s 72.32% first-time pass rate is not spectacular in isolation. It still means more than one in four did not clear cleanly first time once failures and pass-with-rectification outcomes are considered. But against the Clio’s 67.25%, it looks sturdy. The Renault is five points down before we even start slicing the data by age or mileage.
That gap changes the buying advice. A Clio can still be the better car if it has cleaner history, recent suspension work, matching tyres and no repeat advisories. But if two cars are the same age, similarly priced and equally convincing on paper, the Fiesta deserves first look.
Where they fail
The two cars fail in familiar supermini ways, but the order of the problems tells you what to check.
For the Renault Clio, the top failure reasons in 2024 were:
- Suspension pin, bush or joint excessively worn: 30,024
- Spring or spring component fractured or seriously weakened: 28,988
- Rear registration plate lamp or light source missing or inoperative: 23,054
- Steering ball joint with excessive wear or free play: 19,877
- Lamp missing or badly inoperative: 18,410
That is a fairly grim front-end and lighting mix. The Clio list starts with suspension wear, broken or weakened springs, small lighting failures and steering joint play. Some of that is normal small-car attrition. Some of it points to cars living hard lives on bad roads, speed humps and budget maintenance.
For the Ford Fiesta, the top failure reasons were:
- Suspension pin, bush or joint excessively worn: 79,622
- Stop lamp missing or inoperative: 64,398
- Tyre tread depth not meeting requirements: 51,324
- Steering ball joint with excessive wear or free play: 48,181
- Suspension joint dust cover severely deteriorated: 43,969
The Fiesta’s absolute counts are much bigger because there are far more Fiestas in the test record. Do not read 79,622 against 30,024 as the Ford being worse. Read the themes instead. The Fiesta shares the same small-car weak spots: suspension joints, steering joints, tyres and lights. The extra dust-cover item is useful for buyers because it is visible on a lift and often appears as an advisory before it becomes a failure.
The sharper point is this: the Clio’s headline weakness is not one odd electrical quirk or one age-limited recall-style issue. Its top failures are ordinary MOT fundamentals. Suspension, springs, lights, steering. That is exactly where a neglected cheap car gets expensive enough to spoil the deal.
Cohort tells
Age is where the Fiesta’s win becomes more useful. The Clio’s full sample is heavily weighted towards older cars: 546,246 of its 596,897 tests sit in the pre-2018 band. The Fiesta is also older-car heavy, with 2,236,442 of its 2,488,311 tests in the same band. That makes the pre-2018 result the one that matters most to real used buyers.
In the pre-2018 cohort, the Clio passed at 66.08%. The Fiesta passed at 70.65%. That is a 4.57-point Fiesta lead in the part of the market where most cheap examples live. It is also the cohort where mileage, corrosion, weak springs, tired bushes and patchy maintenance start to show properly.
The 2018-2020 band is even more damaging for the Renault. Clio tests in that cohort passed at 79.9%, while Fiesta tests passed at 87.15%. That is a 7.25-point gap. These are not ancient cars. They are the kind of cars many buyers still expect to be routine, predictable and cheap to keep clean. The Ford looks much healthier there.
The 2021-on numbers need care. The Clio shows an 89.62% pass rate against the Fiesta’s 88.04%, which looks like a Renault win until you check the sample. The Clio has only 106 tests in that band. The Fiesta has 6,666. That Clio slice is too small to carry a used-buying verdict by itself.
So the cohort read is plain. The Fiesta wins the two meaningful volume bands. The Clio’s newer-car edge exists in the record, but it is based on a tiny slice and should not outweigh the larger pattern.
Mileage tells
Mileage does not rescue the Clio. The Renault averaged 74,602 miles at test. The Fiesta averaged 73,803 miles. That is only 799 miles apart.
That matters because a big mileage gap can explain a pass-rate gap. If one car is doing 15,000 miles more on average, you expect more tyres, more suspension wear, more brake wear and more failures. Here, that excuse is weak. The Clio is carrying slightly more mileage, but not enough to explain a five-point headline deficit and a seven-point loss in the 2018-2020 cohort.
The older-car cohorts are almost identical on mileage too. Pre-2018 Clios averaged 77,917 miles at test. Pre-2018 Fiestas averaged 78,109 miles. The Ford is fractionally higher there and still passes more often. That is the strongest mileage-adjusted clue in the whole comparison.
In the 2018-2020 band, the Clio averaged 39,073 miles and the Fiesta averaged 36,101. The Renault is about 2,972 miles higher, which may explain part of the gap. It does not explain all of it. A 79.9% pass rate against 87.15% is too wide to park entirely on mileage.
The garage-floor translation is simple. A used Clio needs a stricter underside check. Look for broken springs, worn lower arms, play in steering joints, tired CV boots, lamps that have been ignored and MOT histories with the same advisories repeated year after year. A Fiesta needs the same checks, but the record says more of them arrive at the test station ready to pass.
The numbers we trust
The cleanest numbers in this comparison are the full-sample pass rates, the test counts and the big age cohorts. They are large enough to be useful and broad enough to smooth out odd local patterns.
The Clio’s 596,897 tests are plenty. The Fiesta’s 2,488,311 tests are enormous. The Fiesta is not winning because it has a tiny, cherry-picked sample. It is winning despite being one of the most common used cars in Britain, with all the neglect, learner-driver abuse and cheap-car maintenance that comes with that status.
We trust the pre-2018 cohort most because that is where the used-market action is thickest. The Fiesta leads there, even with slightly higher average mileage. We also trust the 2018-2020 cohort because it is still substantial: 50,545 Clio tests and 245,203 Fiesta tests. The Ford’s 87.15% result in that band is the best number in the article.
We trust the 2021-on Clio result least. Not because it is false, but because 106 tests is too small for a strong verdict. It is a signal to keep watching, not a reason to overturn the comparison.
There is also a human caution. MOT data does not price repairs. It does not know whether a car was fixed cheaply by a careful owner or patched reluctantly by someone trying to sell it. It does not inspect service history, clutch feel, timing-belt age, accident repairs or whether the car has lived near salt air. It tells us what happened when cars reached the annual test. That is still valuable, because the MOT catches the boring failures that buyers actually inherit.
If you are shopping between these two, do not turn this into a badge rule. Turn it into a filter. A Fiesta with clean MOT history, even tyre wear, working lights and no repeat suspension advisories is the stronger bet. A Clio can beat it only when the individual car is clearly better than the Renault average.
Buy the Fiesta when two cars are otherwise equal. Buy the Clio only when the individual history is cleaner, the suspension has evidence of recent work, the tyres are right, and the MOT record is not carrying the same advisories from year to year.