Van MOT advisories: what happens next

The finding, in one table

Every comparison below measures the same thing: of all the advisories recorded in one category, on vehicles of one age, what share had turned into a failure by the next test. Vans on the left, cars on the right, same measure, same dataset.

Share of advisories in each category that had become a failure by the vehicle’s next test. Source: PriceMyRepair analysis of the DVSA MOT testing dataset.

What the top row means in plain terms

Take a hundred brake advisories written on vans between seven and eleven years old. By the next test, fourteen of them had become failures. Take a hundred written on cars of exactly the same age, and the number is nine. That is the widest safety-related gap in the dataset, and it sits on the one category where a warning is least worth ignoring.

The age band matters as much as the category. Seven to eleven is the stretch where a van is out of warranty, past its first round of major wear, and still doing a full working week. It is also the point at which the vehicle is worth little enough that a repair bill starts to look like a decision rather than a formality.

What an advisory actually is

Every item a tester inspects gets one of four outcomes. Only two of them stop the vehicle leaving the workshop, and the one that matters here stops nothing at all.

An advisory is a prediction, not a complaint

The tester is not being difficult. An advisory means the item has been measured against a published threshold, found to be on the right side of it, and judged close enough to the line to be worth writing down. It is the closest thing in the system to a forecast: someone who inspects vehicles for a living has looked at this part and expects it to need attention.

Across all vehicles nationally, the median gap between an advisory being written and the failure it turns into is 376 days. That is the shape of the problem. The warning arrives roughly a full test cycle before the bill, which is exactly long enough to forget about it.

Why the same warning may weigh differently on a van

The record shows the gap. It does not show the reason, and we are not going to invent one. What can be said is that the decision facing a van owner differs from the decision facing a car owner in ways the dataset cannot measure: a van off the road may stop a business trading, the mileage between tests is often several times higher, and the vehicle is frequently loaded to a weight a car never reaches.

Whether any of those explains the pattern is an open question, and a good one for anyone with access to fleet maintenance records. What this dataset establishes is that the pattern is real, consistent across age bands, and concentrated in the categories where wear accumulates rather than where components simply stop working.

Where vans and cars differ

The three categories that carry the most advisories, broken out by vehicle age. Every cell is the share of advisories in that category, on vehicles in that age band, that had become a failure by the next test.

Gap shown in percentage points. Highlighted rows are the two widest in the dataset. Source: PriceMyRepair analysis of the DVSA MOT testing dataset.

Three patterns worth separating

Suspension carries the highest conversion rate of any category, for vans and cars alike — a quarter of suspension advisories on older vehicles end in a failure. That is not a van story, it is a national one, and it holds across the whole record.

Brakes and body are where the two vehicle types come apart. On a young vehicle the categories behave almost identically; the body gap at up to six years old is under one percentage point. By twelve years the same gap has grown nearly sixfold. Whatever separates a van from a car in this dataset, it is not present when the vehicle is new — it accumulates.

The third pattern is the one that matters most for anyone booking work. In every one of the nine cells above, the van figure is higher than the car figure. Not by the same amount, and not for the same reason, but consistently and in the same direction.

Vans fail in a different order

Rank the six highest-volume inspection categories by how often an advisory becomes a failure, and cars and vans do not produce the same list. Two categories swap places, and one moves further than any other.

The move that matters

On cars, brake wear is the safest advisory of the six to receive. Of every hundred written, nine come back as failures — fewer than any other major category. On vans the same advisory produces twelve failures per hundred and sits above both tyres and brake performance in the ranking.

Nothing about the item itself has changed. A pad wearing thin is measured against the same threshold on both vehicle types. What changes is what happens in the year that follows, and on this evidence a brake advisory on a van is a materially different piece of information from the same words on a car.

And the one that swaps

Body and structure moves up one place on vans, displacing steering. It is a smaller shift than brake wear, but it holds across the whole record and grows steadily with vehicle age — the pattern set out in the next section.

Every category has its own age signature

The gap between vans and cars does not simply widen as the vehicle gets older. It behaves differently in each category, and in one of them the difference is at its widest when the van is almost new.

Body and structure: the gap that grows

On a young vehicle the two types are almost indistinguishable — under one percentage point separates them. By twelve years the gap has grown to nearly six. This is the only category in the dataset where the difference accumulates in a straight line, and it is the closest thing here to a story about how a vehicle is used over its whole life rather than in any one year.

Brake wear: a mid-life peak

The widest brake gap sits in the middle band, at seven to eleven years, and then narrows again on the oldest vehicles. One plausible reading is survivorship: vans that reach twelve years and are still being tested are not a random sample of vans, and the ones kept that long may be the ones being looked after. The dataset cannot confirm that, and we are flagging it as a question rather than an answer.

Suspension: widest when the van is new

This is the finding we did not expect. On vehicles up to six years old, a suspension advisory on a van converts into a failure at 14.50% against 9.53% for a car — a gap of nearly five percentage points, wider than at any later age. As both vehicle types get older the gap closes rather than opens.

The absolute numbers still rise with age for both, as they do for everything. What changes is the distance between them. A suspension warning on a nearly-new van carries more weight, relative to the same warning on a nearly-new car, than it ever will again.

All 29 vans ranked

Every model in the dataset carrying more than fifty thousand advisories, ranked by the share that became failures. The spread from top to bottom is 7.59 percentage points — on identical wording from the tester.

“On the road” counts vehicles still being tested in the most recent years of the record. “Still outstanding” is the share of advisories that were recorded again at the following test without being fixed. Models carrying fewer than fifty thousand advisories are excluded. Source: PriceMyRepair analysis of the DVSA MOT testing dataset.

How to read this table

A high figure in the fourth column does not mean the van is unreliable. It means that when a tester writes a warning on that model, the warning is more likely to come back as a failure — which is a statement about what happens after the test at least as much as about the vehicle. The Transit sits mid-table on a volume of five million advisories, which makes it the most stable estimate in the whole set.

The fifth column is the more uncomfortable one. Across every model on the list, roughly a third of advisories were still there at the next test, neither fixed nor escalated. That figure barely moves between the best and worst vans, which suggests the difference between them lies in which advisories get ignored rather than how many.

Small vans do worse than big ones

Suspension carries more advisories than any other category, so it is the fairest place to compare one kind of van against another. Group the models by size and the result runs against what you would expect from mileage alone.

Suspension and axle advisories only. National figure across all vehicles is 18.73%. Difference in percentage points. Groups are our classification by vehicle size and body type, not an official category. Source: PriceMyRepair analysis of the DVSA MOT testing dataset.

The vehicles doing the most work look after their advisories best

A large panel van covers more miles than a small one, carries heavier loads, and spends more of its life at maximum weight. Every mechanical argument says its suspension advisories should convert into failures more often. They convert less often.

The four lowest rates in the whole ranking belong to a Tourneo, an Amarok, a Crafter and a Sprinter. The four highest belong to a Primastar, a Combo, a Vivaro and a Trafic. Nothing in that ordering tracks mileage or load. It tracks something else, and the record does not say what.

A question we cannot answer and would like someone to

One reading is ownership. Large vans are more likely to sit on a maintenance contract with scheduled servicing, where an advisory becomes a line on someone’s system rather than a decision for the person driving it. Small vans are more likely to belong to the person behind the wheel, who also pays for the repair and loses the day’s work.

That would explain the pattern, including the Transit, which spans both worlds more than any other model. It would also explain why the share of advisories left outstanding barely varies between models while conversion varies a lot. But the MOT record contains no information about who owns a vehicle or how it is maintained, so this stays a hypothesis. Anyone holding fleet maintenance data alongside registration numbers could settle it in an afternoon.

What to do with an advisory

The figures on this page describe what happened to other people’s vans. What they are useful for is deciding which line on your own certificate deserves attention before the next test comes round.

The three categories this page says to prioritise

Brake wear moves further up the ranking on vans than any other item, and it is the one category where an advisory that is left alone has a direct road-safety consequence rather than a financial one. Costs for pads, discs and calipers are set out in the brake pads and discs guide and the caliper guide.

Suspension carries the highest conversion rate of any category for every vehicle type, and on vans it peaks early. The suspension guide covers the components as a group; shock absorbers and coil springs have their own pages because they are priced very differently and are frequently confused with each other.

Structure is the one to watch on an older van, and it is also the hardest to price in advance because the extent is rarely visible until the vehicle is on a lift. If the advisory wording is unfamiliar, the advisory glossary translates the standard phrases into plain English.

Timing the work

The median gap between an advisory and the failure it becomes is 376 days across all vehicles — long enough that booking the work alongside the next service usually costs less than treating it as an emergency later. Servicing intervals and prices are covered in the service cost guide, and test fees in the MOT cost guide.

We earn a commission if you book through this link, at no cost to you. It does not affect which garages you are shown or what they charge. Our funding page explains how the site pays for itself.

Methodology and citation

Everything on this page comes from one public dataset and one method. Both are described here in enough detail to be checked, and the limitations are listed rather than buried.

The dataset

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

We use tests conducted by DVSA only, excluding those recorded by the DVA in Northern Ireland and by the DVLA, and only outcomes recorded as a pass or a fail. Defect records are limited to the current inspection scheme, because the earlier scheme used incompatible categories. Vehicles with an implausible age are excluded.

The method

For every advisory in the record we look forward to the same vehicle’s next test and ask what happened to that item: was it recorded as a failure, recorded again as an advisory, or absent because it had been dealt with. The three outcomes are mutually exclusive. Conversion is the first as a share of all three.

Vans are identified by model. Thirty-two commercial models were classified from the vehicle record; twenty-nine carry enough advisories to report. Everything else in the dataset forms the comparison group. Comparisons are always drawn at the same vehicle age, because age dominates every outcome in this dataset and an uncontrolled comparison would show nothing but fleet age.

What this analysis cannot do

Free to cite

Every figure on this page may be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any publication, with attribution. No permission is needed and no registration is required to see the underlying tables. If a cut of the data would be more useful than the one presented here — by region, by age, 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.