Do vans fail their MOT more often than cars?

The short answer

Yes, at every age we can measure. But quoting a single number would miss the point, because the size of the difference depends almost entirely on how old the vehicle is.

Share of tests ending in a failure, by vehicle age. Source: PriceMyRepair analysis of the DVSA MOT testing dataset.

The comparison worth remembering

A van reaching its first test at three years old fails 22.40% of the time. A car does not reach that level until it is six — 22.50%, a difference of a tenth of a percentage point. On this measure, a van arrives at its first MOT already carrying the wear a car accumulates over three additional years.

That is the whole finding in one line, and it is the line most owners have never seen. Nearly one in four vans fails the first test it ever takes.

And then the gap closes

The intuitive expectation is that a working vehicle falls further behind every year. It does not. The gap peaks at the first test and narrows every year afterwards: 7.30 points at three, 5.28 at six, 2.66 at ten, 1.05 at fifteen. At seventeen years it reaches 0.96 points, which is close enough to nothing that a van and a car of that age fail at effectively the same rate.

Both curves rise with age, as everything in this dataset does. What changes is the distance between them, and the distance shrinks.

How the gap changes with age

Both lines climb, because everything in this dataset climbs with age. The story is the shaded area between them, which is at its widest on the left and almost disappears on the right.

Reading the left-hand side

The van line starts high and rises gently. The car line starts low and rises steeply, and by around the twelve-year mark it has almost caught up. Cars do most of their deterioration during the years vans have already been through.

For anyone buying second-hand, the practical consequence sits on the left of this chart. A three-year-old ex-fleet van is not the equivalent of a three-year-old car with low mileage. On the only national measure available, it is closer to a six-year-old car.

The first test, model by model

The first MOT is the cleanest comparison available, because every vehicle reaches it at the same age and none has been filtered out yet by scrappage. Thirty-two models, ranked from best to worst.

Failure rate at the first test, taken at three years old. Final column shows the difference in percentage points against the 15.10% average for cars at the same age. Models with fewer than two thousand first tests are excluded. Source: PriceMyRepair analysis of the DVSA MOT testing dataset.

One model beats the car average, and it is a pickup

The Volkswagen Amarok fails its first test at 13.94%, below the 15.10% recorded by cars of the same age. It is the only vehicle on the list to manage that. The Ford Tourneo, which is a passenger vehicle built on a van platform rather than a working van, is the only other model within half a point.

Both figures rest on smaller volumes than the models further down. The Amarok has 25,721 first tests against 1,212,521 for the Transit, so it is a less stable estimate and should be read as such.

Pickups occupy the top of the table

The six best-performing models after the Tourneo are all pickups: Amarok, D-Max, Ranger, L200, Navara and Hilux. Not one panel van appears above the Transporter in eleventh place.

A pickup is registered and tested as a commercial vehicle but is frequently used as private transport, often on a lifestyle purchase rather than a working contract. That would put it closer to a car in everything except its paperwork. The data cannot confirm the explanation, but the separation between pickups and panel vans in this table is too clean to be noise.

What vans actually fail on

Knowing that vans fail more often says nothing about what fails. Break the failing items down by category and the profile turns out to be shaped differently from a car’s, with one category standing well apart from the rest.

Share of all failing items falling into each category. Columns sum to 100% across every category, of which the nine largest are shown. Difference in percentage points. Source: PriceMyRepair analysis of the DVSA MOT testing dataset.

The tyre gap is the largest difference on the list

Tyres and wheels account for 14.70% of everything a car fails on, and 7.63% of everything a van fails on — less than half the share, and a wider divergence than any other category in either direction.

One reading is that tyres on a working vehicle get replaced on a schedule rather than when they reach the limit, because a blowout on a loaded van is a different kind of event from a blowout on a car. Another is that tyres are simply crowded out of the profile by heavier categories. The record supports neither over the other.

Small lamps, large difference

Position and marker lamps take 5.72% of van failures against 3.81% for cars. In absolute terms this is a cheap item — a bulb or a lens — but it is a bigger part of what stops a van passing than it is for a car, and it is one of the few categories on the list that can be checked in a minute without tools.

Headlamps run the other way, at 6.11% against 8.35%. Taken together, the lighting picture on a van is less about the main beams and more about everything else that has to be lit.

The categories that mirror the advisory data

Brakes, body and steering all take a larger share of van failures than car failures. Those are the same three categories where advisories on vans convert into failures at a higher rate than advisories on cars, which we set out separately in our analysis of what happens to van advisories after the test.

Two different measures, built from the same record but counting different things, point at the same three categories. That consistency is the strongest reason to treat the pattern as real rather than as an artefact of how the data was cut.

Two Transits, two different vans

The Transit and the Transit Custom share a name and a badge. On the national record they do not share a failure rate, and the distance between them is larger than the distance between vans and cars.

Failure rate by vehicle age. Negative difference means the Custom fails less often. Source: PriceMyRepair analysis of the DVSA MOT testing dataset.

The Custom belongs in the top of the table, not the bottom

At its first test the Transit Custom fails 17.56% of the time. Placed into the model ranking earlier on this page, that puts it between the Ford Ranger and the Mitsubishi L200 — in the top six, among the pickups, and clear of every panel van including the Transporter.

The full-size Transit fails at 23.76% at the same age, twentieth of thirty-two. Someone comparing the two by name alone would have no way of knowing they sit at opposite ends of the same table.

The gap peaks at seven years and then collapses

The difference widens from 6.20 points at three years to 9.30 at seven, then closes rapidly. By twelve years the Custom is fractionally worse than the full-size Transit. That shape mirrors the van-against-car curve earlier on this page: an early advantage that ordinary ageing erases.

What to do before your test

Three things follow from the figures on this page, and none of them requires trusting our interpretation of why the numbers look the way they do.

Where the money actually goes

Suspension and axles are the single biggest category of failing items on a van at 19.17%, and the components involved vary enormously in price. The suspension guide covers them as a group, with shock absorbers and coil springs priced separately because they are routinely confused with one another.

Brakes come next, and split across two categories on the certificate: condition of the components and measured performance on the rollers. Pads and discs are covered in the brake guide. If the wording on your certificate is unfamiliar, the advisory glossary translates the standard phrases.

Timing

Booking a service immediately before the test lets a garage catch the cheap items while the vehicle is already on the ramp, which usually costs less than a failure and a retest. Intervals and prices are in the service cost guide, and test fees in the MOT cost guide. Every cost guide on the site is indexed under repair costs.

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Methodology and citation

One public dataset, one method, and a list of the things this analysis cannot do. The limitations are here rather than in a footnote because two of them change how the figures should be read.

The dataset

The DVSA publishes the complete record of MOT tests as open data. This analysis uses the most recent full snapshot: 829,654,015 tests across 137,840,356 vehicles, carrying 697,809,455 individual defect records.

We use tests carried out by DVSA only, excluding those recorded by the DVA in Northern Ireland and by the DVLA. Only outcomes recorded as a pass or a fail are counted. Defect records are limited to the current inspection scheme, because the previous scheme used categories that cannot be mapped onto it. Vehicles with an implausible recorded age are excluded.

The method

Failure rate is the share of tests at a given vehicle age that ended in a failure. Vans are identified by model: thirty-two commercial models were classified from the vehicle record, and everything else in the dataset forms the comparison group described here as cars.

Every comparison is made at the same vehicle age. This matters more than any other decision in the analysis, because age dominates the outcome so heavily that an uncontrolled comparison between two fleets of different average age would show nothing but that difference in age.

What this analysis cannot do

Why we do not publish a survival rate

It would be easy to divide the vehicles still being tested by the vehicles ever recorded and call the result durability. The figure is available and it looks compelling: on that measure one model scores 94.9% and another 46.5%.

It would also be close to meaningless. A model launched recently has had almost no opportunity to leave the road, while one on sale for decades carries every example ever sold in the denominator. The measure tracks how long a nameplate has existed far more than how long the vehicles last, and a discontinued model looks catastrophic for no reason connected to its engineering.

Doing it properly means following registration-year cohorts rather than nameplates. That requires processing the underlying record differently from the way we currently do, and until we have done it there is no survival figure on this page. Rankings of the longest-lasting vans built on the simple version of this calculation should be treated with caution wherever they appear.

Free to cite

Every figure here may be reproduced in any publication with attribution. No permission is needed and nothing is behind a form. If a different cut would be more useful than the one presented — by region, by fuel, by age band, by model — we will produce it on request.

We are not affiliated with the DVSA, the DVLA or any garage group. The analysis, the classifications and any errors in them are ours alone. Corrections are welcome and will be published on this page rather than made silently.