The Short Answer
The Honda Jazz wins this one, and it wins in the least dramatic but most useful way: a better first-time pass rate across a very large slice of official UK records. The Toyota Yaris posted a
Pass-Rate Split
This is a proper reliability duel, not a flimsy brand argument. The Yaris and Jazz both trade on the same broad promise: simple Japanese supermini, low stress, low drama, easy to recommend to someone who does not want their life arranged around warning lights.
The public UK MOT record is useful because it strips away the pub wisdom. It does not care which badge has the better reputation. It records what happened at test time.
The Yaris has the larger sample:
The Yaris failed 17.39% of tests and had 6.69% recorded as PRS. The Jazz failed 17.23% and had 5.10% PRS. That is the interesting split. The outright fail rates are very close, but the Jazz converts more of its tests into first-time passes instead of pass-after-rectification outcomes.
That matters for buyers. PRS is not the same ownership pain as a large mechanical failure, but it still means the car arrived needing something put right. A car that passes first time is usually the car that was prepared, maintained, or simply in better condition on the day.
If both cars are equally tidy, equally priced and equally proven by history, the Jazz gets the nod. If the Yaris has the cleaner individual record, buy the Yaris. The data gives the starting bias, not permission to stop thinking.
Where They Fail
The Yaris failure list is mostly the small-car reality of age, weather, low-cost maintenance and British roads. Its top recorded failure reasons are:
- Headlamp reflector or lens slightly defective: 19,603
- Lamp missing, inoperative, or more than half not functioning where multiple light sources are fitted: 13,833
- Tyre tread depth below the required limit: 12,013
- Wiper blade missing or not clearing the windscreen: 11,452
- Spring or spring component fractured or seriously weakened: 10,312
That is not a horror show. It is lamps, tyres, wipers and springs. Some of it is neglect. Some of it is age. The spring count is the one to respect, because a fractured or seriously weakened spring is not a five-minute bulb conversation.
The Jazz list has a different flavour. Its top recorded failure reasons are:
- Headlamp reflector or lens slightly defective: 22,757
- Rear registration plate lamp or light source missing or inoperative: 16,053
- Steering rack gaiter or ball-joint dust cover damaged or deteriorated: 13,664
- Lamp missing, inoperative, or more than half not functioning where multiple light sources are fitted: 11,750
- Brake lining or pad worn below 1.5mm: 11,225
The Jazz has plenty of lighting faults too, but it adds a stronger steering gaiter and brake-wear signal near the top. That fits the way many older Jazzes are used: short trips, town work, gentle owners, sometimes long periods without the sort of preventative attention that keeps brakes and rubber parts happy.
The key difference is not that one car has failures and the other does not. Both fail in ordinary, inspectable ways. The Jazz wins despite having some sharp mechanical flags in its list, because more cars still arrive ready to pass first time.
For the Yaris, repeated lamp and wiper failures are a clue about owner attitude. For the Jazz, repeated gaiter, brake and rear lamp entries deserve a more careful inspection. Neither car is expensive because of one bulb. Both get expensive when small warnings are allowed to stack up.
Cohort Tells
The all-age pass rate gives the Jazz the win, but age bands explain where that win is strongest. This is the part to read if you are buying used, because a 2008 car and a 2020 car are not the same risk just because the badge on the boot matches.
For pre-2018 cars, the Yaris recorded 600,585 tests and a 73.50% pass rate. The Jazz recorded 474,775 tests and a 75.54% pass rate. That older cohort is the proper budget-buyer battlefield, and the Jazz wins it by 2.04 percentage points.
That is not nothing. Older cars carry more miles, more owners, more skipped jobs and more cheap fixes. If a car can keep its pass rate ahead in that band, the number deserves respect.
For 2018-2020 cars, the gap gets wider. The Yaris recorded 90,092 tests and an 87.76% pass rate. The Jazz recorded 51,809 tests and a 91.43% pass rate. That is a 3.67-point Jazz advantage in the age band many buyers now see as the sweet spot: modern enough to feel current, old enough to be meaningfully cheaper than nearly new.
For 2021-on cars, the story flips. The Yaris recorded 796 tests and a 93.47% pass rate. The Jazz recorded only 233 tests and an 86.27% pass rate. The Yaris looks much stronger here, but the Jazz sample is tiny. Treat that newer Jazz figure carefully. A few hundred tests can move around more easily than hundreds of thousands.
The honest read is this: the Jazz wins the big, useful cohorts. It wins pre-2018 and 2018-2020, where most used buyers are actually shopping. The Yaris wins the 2021-on slice, but that slice is too small on both cars to overturn the main result.
This is why the verdict goes to Honda without pretending Toyota has fallen apart. The Yaris remains a strong used car. The Jazz is just cleaner in the sections that matter most to normal used buyers.
Mileage Tells
Mileage gives the Yaris a possible excuse, but not enough of one.
The Yaris average mileage at test is 69,286. The Jazz average is 65,885. So the Toyota is carrying 3,401 more miles on the all-age figure. That is a real difference. More miles normally means more wear, more tyres, more suspension fatigue and more chances for old advisories to become failures.
Look at the older cars. Pre-2018 Yarises average 75,306 miles at test. Pre-2018 Jazzes average 70,390. The Yaris is carrying 4,916 extra miles in the old-car cohort. That helps explain some of the gap, but not all of it. The Jazz still posts a better pass rate in that age band.
For 2018-2020 cars, the mileage gap also favours the Honda. The Yaris averages 29,659 miles. The Jazz averages 24,851. That is 4,808 fewer miles for the Jazz, and the Jazz delivers the stronger pass rate. Some of that win is likely mileage. Some of it may be condition, usage, owner profile, or the car itself. The record cannot separate those cleanly.
The 2021-on band is stranger. The Yaris averages 25,591 miles, while the Jazz averages 42,858. That is a big mileage disadvantage for the newer Jazz sample, and it may help explain why the Yaris wins that tiny cohort so clearly. But with only 233 Jazz tests in the band, this is supporting colour rather than the backbone of the verdict.
The mileage lesson is plain. A Jazz with 90,000 miles is not automatically safer than a Yaris with 60,000 miles because the model-level pass rate is higher. You still buy the individual car. But when the cars are genuinely comparable, the Jazz starts from a better statistical place.
Mileage does not kill these cars by itself. Neglected mileage does.
A high-mile Yaris with a clean, consistent record can be the right buy. A lower-mile Jazz with repeated brake, gaiter and lighting failures can be the wrong one. The model result helps you choose between equals. The actual MOT history tells you whether the example in front of you deserves your money.
The Numbers We Trust
These figures come from the 2024 public UK MOT record, filtered to the Toyota Yaris and Honda Jazz model pages used on this site. The headline number is first-time pass rate. Test count is the recorded number of tests in the same snapshot. Average mileage is the mileage recorded at test.
The clean comparison is:
- Toyota Yaris: 691,473 tests, 75.38% pass rate, 69,286 average miles
- Honda Jazz: 526,817 tests, 77.11% pass rate, 65,885 average miles
- Pass-rate gap: Jazz ahead by 1.73 percentage points
- Pre-2018 pass rates: Yaris 73.50%, Jazz 75.54%
- 2018-2020 pass rates: Yaris 87.76%, Jazz 91.43%
- 2021-on pass rates: Yaris 93.47%, Jazz 86.27%
The top failure lists are also part of the judgement. The Yaris points heavily at lighting, tyres, wipers and springs. The Jazz points at lighting too, but also brings front gaiter and brake-pad wear higher up the list.
There are limits. The record does not tell you whether the owner serviced the car well, whether a repair was done privately before the test, how harshly the car was driven, or whether a cheap advisory was ignored for years. It also does not tell you repair cost. A wiper blade and a brake job do not belong in the same mental basket.
That is why the right move is to use the model data first, then read the individual car’s history. You are looking for patterns. One isolated failure can be ordinary. The same family of failures repeating across years is a maintenance signature.
The Yaris remains one of the easiest used superminis to recommend. It has a vast sample, a good pass rate, and no catastrophic theme in the top failures. The Jazz is simply better on the numbers that matter here. It passes first time more often, wins the older cohort, and wins the 2018-2020 cohort by a wider margin.
That makes the Honda the sharper reliability buy for most used shoppers.
Verdict
The Honda Jazz wins. Not by theatre, not by folklore, and not because the Yaris has suddenly become a bad car. It wins because the 2024 record gives it a higher first-time pass rate across more than half a million tests, and because that advantage holds in the two most useful age bands for used buyers.
The Toyota Yaris is still a strong choice. It has the bigger sample, a good pass rate, and a newer-car cohort that looks excellent. If you find a clean Yaris with a better individual history than the Jazz next to it, buy the Yaris without guilt.
But if both cars are ordinary examples, similarly priced, and similarly maintained, the Honda Jazz is the reliability supermini to put first.