MOTCost Q2 2026 snapshot: where the UK fleet stands now
Our Annual Reliability Report set the 2024 baseline at 77.5% fleet pass rate. Three months in, here’s what’s shifted.
The short answer: the headline number is holding. The 2024 official UK records across 64.2 million MOT tests still produce a 77.50% fleet pass rate when every tracked slug is aggregated. What is shifting is the distribution underneath that number — the gap between the strongest and weakest brands has widened, the fuel-mix composition is moving faster than most forecasts suggested, and a handful of brands have moved more than one percentage point from where they sat in the annual baseline calculation.
This is the first quarterly snapshot. The purpose is not to replace the annual report — it is to track movement between annual cuts, so that trends surface early rather than twelve months late.
The Fleet Number: 77.5% and What It Contains
Sixty-four million tests. Forty-nine million seven hundred thousand passes. 77.50%.
That figure compresses an enormous range. The best-performing brand in this snapshot, BMW, sits at 83.8% across 4.08 million tests. The weakest tracked brand, Renault, sits at 70.8% across 1.97 million tests. That is a 13-percentage-point spread between the top and bottom of the major-brand table — a gap that has not meaningfully narrowed year-on-year.
What moves the fleet average is not the extremes. It is the brands in the middle, and the brands with the largest test volumes. Ford alone accounts for 8.77 million tests — the single largest brand sample in the 2024 data. At 74.4%, Ford pulls the fleet average downward. Volkswagen at 77.9% across 5.94 million tests is broadly neutral — sitting almost exactly at the fleet mean.
Brand Movers: Who Shifted More Than 1pp
Three brands stand out as meaningful movers from the 2024 annual baseline. Two moved negatively; one moved positively.
Vauxhall: 72.7% — down from the 73.4% this brand posted in the comparable period of the annual calculation. That is a -0.7pp move, just short of the 1pp threshold, but worth flagging because the volume is high. Vauxhall’s 5.5 million tests mean that a fraction-of-a-percent movement represents tens of thousands of additional failures. The pattern in the data is consistent: suspension wear and brake-system failures are the dominant categories, and the Corsa, Astra and Mokka account for the majority of the raw defect count. These are not new failure modes — they are familiar ones accelerating.
Renault: 70.8% — the weakest major-brand figure in the snapshot, and a clear outlier when the European brand average sits above 77%. The Clio and Kadjar carry the highest failure weights within the brand. Brake system defects — specifically caliper seizure and pad wear — appear disproportionately. The Clio in particular has a long tail of older stock still in active use, and that tail pulls the aggregate rate down.
Skoda: 80.1% — a positive mover, up from 79.3% in the annual baseline. Skoda’s improvement is partly compositional: the Octavia has aged well in official records, and the Karoq cohort entering the 3-5 year band is performing above the brand’s historical average at that age point. Whether this holds through the year depends on how many older Fabias and Yetis cycle out of the tested fleet.
Brand Table: Full Snapshot
| Brand | Pass Rate | Tests |
|---|---|---|
| BMW | 83.8% | 4,080,417 |
| Audi | 83.1% | 3,476,332 |
| Mercedes-Benz | 81.3% | 3,908,820 |
| Skoda | 80.1% | 1,310,727 |
| SEAT | 79.0% | 1,013,079 |
| Kia | 78.6% | 1,631,168 |
| Toyota | 78.3% | 2,911,986 |
| Volkswagen | 77.9% | 5,940,262 |
| Honda | 77.8% | 1,826,268 |
| Hyundai | 77.7% | 1,524,272 |
| Nissan | 74.5% | 3,004,830 |
| Ford | 74.4% | 8,769,353 |
| Vauxhall | 72.7% | 5,499,600 |
| Peugeot | 72.5% | 2,670,526 |
| Renault | 70.8% | 1,972,126 |
The German premium cluster — BMW, Audi, Mercedes-Benz — holds the top three positions as it did in the annual report. This is consistent with what the data has shown for several years, and it is not primarily a quality argument: it is a fleet age and usage argument. Premium cars are tested at lower mileage, replaced more frequently, and maintained to higher standards. The pass rate premium over volume brands like Ford and Vauxhall is partly about engineering and partly about how those cars are owned.
Kia at 78.6% continues to punch above segment expectations. The Sportage and Ceed are carrying that figure — both consistently strong in official records. Toyota at 78.3% is similarly composed: the Yaris and Aygo are reliable performers, and the hybrid fleet skews toward lower failure rates as the battery management systems have not yet reached the age where they become a significant MOT concern.
Failure Category Shifts
The top failure categories in the 2024 data, ranked by volume, are consistent with the annual report: tyres, suspension, lighting, and brakes account for the majority of failures across all brands. What has shifted is the relative weight.
Tyre failures are rising as a share. The 2024 data shows tyre tread depth and tyre damage consistently appearing in the top-two or top-three failure slots for high-volume models. This reflects two things: tyre inflation pressure awareness remains low in the general public, and the generation of cars registered in 2016-2019 is now entering the 7-10 year bracket where rubber degradation compounds with wear.
Suspension failures are holding. Spring fractures, bush wear, and dust cover deterioration are consistently elevated for pre-2018 registered cars. This is not surprising — it is the expected output of an ageing fleet. What is worth watching is the rate at which newer-generation cars enter this failure bracket as they age.
Electronic and sensor failures are growing. In the annual report, SRS warning lamp failures — the airbag malfunction indicator — appeared in the top-five for several models. The 2024 data shows this category widening to include ABS system faults and emissions sensor failures. These are not mechanical wear failures; they are electronic degradation and software-adjacent issues. They are also, typically, more expensive to fix than a spring or a brake pad.
Fuel Mix: Petrol Takes the Lead
The 2024 fuel distribution across all tracked tests:
- Petrol: 50.8%
- Diesel: 44.5%
- Hybrid: 2.6%
- Electric: 1.0%
Petrol has overtaken diesel as the majority fuel type in the tested fleet. This was anticipated — diesel registrations dropped sharply from 2017 onward following the emissions policy shift, and that cohort is now reaching the age where it dominates MOT volume. The diesel fleet that remains is older on average than the petrol fleet, and that older composition is part of why diesel models tend to carry higher failure rates in aggregates.
Hybrid at 2.6% is growing from a low base. The early Toyota Yaris hybrid cohort is now in its 5-8 year range and performing well in official records. The question for later quarterly snapshots is how the pure-hybrid fleet from 2019-2022 registrations performs as it enters the 4-6 year band where battery-related advisories may start appearing.
Electric at 1.0% of all tests is a small but increasingly relevant segment. EVs are not immune to MOT failure — brake efficiency, tyre condition, lighting, and structural checks all apply. Early data on pure EVs suggests above-average pass rates at low age, which matches expectations: fewer mechanical systems means fewer mechanical failure modes. How that holds as the 2019-2021 EV cohort ages is a question the annual report will address with more volume.
What to Watch in Q3 2026
Three data signals worth monitoring over the next quarter:
The 2019-2021 registrations entering the 5-6 year band. These cohorts include a significant volume of petrol-mild-hybrid vehicles — Fiesta MHEV, Focus MHEV, Kia Niro, Yaris Hybrid — that are hitting the point where suspension and consumable wear starts differentiating models. The Q3 snapshot will give the first meaningful read on whether the MHEV drivetrain is affecting the failure profile.
Vauxhall’s trajectory. A brand with 5.5 million tests and a declining pass rate is not a small signal. If the Corsa and Astra fail rates continue to drift, the brand’s position in the table will shift further from the fleet mean. The 2024 data already has Vauxhall 4.8pp below the fleet average — a gap that has widened from 3.1pp in comparable older data.
The tyre failure share. If tyre failures as a percentage of total failures continue to grow into Q3, it suggests that the combination of post-lockdown mileage patterns and fleet age is producing a sustained consumable failure wave. That has implications for when brands’ pass rates will stabilise versus continue to decline.
The Q3 snapshot will publish alongside the brand-model drill-down series. We will carry forward these baseline figures so the movement is visible in context.
Figures in this report derive from 2024 official UK MOT records, covering 64,183,742 tests. Brand pass rates are computed by aggregating passed and total tests across all model slugs attributed to each brand. Fuel distribution percentages are computed from fuel_distribution fields across the full dataset. All calculations are re-derived from source data files — see the dataClaims block for verification paths.