Austin Mini — MOT statistics 2024

The Austin Mini failed 27.75% of 3,031 first MOT attempts in 2024 ("first-time", excluding retests). Adjusted for the age of the fleet, its initial-failure ratio is 79.5 (100 = expected for its age profile). This car fails its MOT about 20% less often than expected for its age. Small sample — treat with care. But this fleet is driven far less than average: matched on annual mileage as well as age, using 2019-2024 test chains rather than 2024 alone, the figure is 117.1, on the other side of normal. Both numbers below.

Age-adjusted peer: BMW X4 (index 79.7) — the two published results are 0.2 index points apart.

Austin Mini common problems: what actually fails the MOT

Lamps, reflectors and electrical equipment stand out at 37.9 per 100 tests, against 29.4 per 100 tests across UK vehicles of the same ages.

higher bar = fails more oftenrate per 100 tests

family vs national — matched to UK vehicles of the same ages — top component groups, per 100 tests. Legend: This family · National avg. Combined labels: family / national average. A gap here reflects how these vehicles are driven, used and maintained as well as how they were built — an MOT defect is a test outcome, not a breakdown.

Named defects ranked by how much more often they appear than the national average — not by raw rate.

Austin Mini MOT advisories: what gets flagged

Suspension is highest at 38.1 per 100 tests; Non-component advisories are lowest at 6.0 per 100 tests — the gap is 32.1 per 100 tests.

higher bar = flagged more oftenadvisory items per 100 initial tests

Advisories are wear the tester noted but didn't fail — what will need money soon.

If a car like this fails, does it fail again?

A failure rate does not say whether a failure is a one-off or the start of something. This follows the same vehicles into their next ordinary MOT a year later — retests after a repair are excluded, because they follow a failure by definition. 2019-2024.

A failed test raises next year's chance of failing again by 7.3 percentage points. The failure most likely to come back is visibility — 30.8% of those vehicles fail again next year. Some of this is the vehicle and some is the owner: a car that was let go once tends to be let go again. One caveat: a car that fails may be sold or scrapped rather than tested again, so these figures describe the vehicles that came back.

Adjusted for how much these are actually driven

The headline index adjusts for the fleet's age. Wear, though, follows mileage: a three-year-old taxi and a three-year-old garage queen sit in the same age band. These two rows compare every car with vehicles of the same age, and then with vehicles of the same age and the same annual mileage, 2019-2024, on 18,934 tests. Both stand on the six-year corpus so they are measured on identical data — compare them with each other, not with the headline index above, which is measured on 2024 alone.

Split by how much each car is driven. This is a split by annual mileage, not by body type — the MOT record does not say whether a car is a conversion. Within each band the index compares with vehicles of the same age driven as much.

This is the rare case where usage changes the answer, not just the number: once you compare these against vehicles driven as little, the car moves from one side of normal to the other. Read the mileage-matched figure, not the headline one. One limit to keep in mind: mileage is partly a result of how often a car breaks down — one that spends weeks in the workshop covers fewer miles — so the mileage-matched figure can understate a real weakness. Tests with no usable odometer reading are left out of it.

How does the Austin Mini perform as it gets older?

The Mini at age 20 is well below the reference at 18.1%, against 41.0% for all vehicles of the same age.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Chart axes: car age, years · failure-rate scale 0–47%.

Takeaway: solid line: this family; dashed: all cars.

How dangerous are Austin Mini MOT failures?

Major defects stand out at 112.0 per 100 tests, against 52.8 per 100 tests nationally.

higher bar = fails more oftenrate per 100 tests

Chart values: Minor 16.4 · Major 112.0 · Dangerous 10.8.

Per 100 tests on this family. National average: Minor 14.2 · Major 52.8 · Dangerous 11.2 per 100.

Does the month of an Austin Mini MOT matter?

Jan is highest at 35.8%; Aug is lowest at 28.6% — the gap is 7.1 percentage points.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Chart scale: 27%–37%.

bars: Austin Mini · dashed: all class-4 cars

Takeaway: the spread between best and worst month is 7.1 percentage points — noticeable seasonality. Seasonality partly reflects registration-date clustering, not weather.

Before reading the shape: most of it is not about cars. Britain changes its registration plates twice a year, and 18.9% of these cars were first registered in March with another17.1% in September — 36% in two months against the 17% an even spread would give. An MOT falls due three years after first registration, so the buying calendar becomes the testing calendar. That shapes how many cars are tested each month — not how often they fail: the busiest months here are not the worst ones, so read the failure line on its own and the volume behind it separately.

Austin Mini average mileage by age

At age 20+, the middle half of Minis runs from 15,023 miles to 68,038 miles, against 43,630 miles as the median.

further right = more milesmedian is the typical car; band is p25–p75

Does high mileage mean more Austin Mini MOT failures at the same age?

Within the same age group, split by odometer (2024 MOTs), so this separates wear from age: at ages 15+, 15.3% of those with under 40,000 miles failed first time versus 20.4% of those with 70,000–100,000 miles.No clear mileage gap inside this age group, among cars still being tested.

line: median · band: middle half of the fleet (p25–p75)

A typical 20+-year-old Mini has ~43,630 miles on the clock. Much more — ask why; much less — check for gaps in the MOT history.

Where in Britain the Austin Mini fails its MOT most

Bournemouth area is highest at 43.8%; Romford area is lowest at 16.9% — the gap is 26.9 percentage points.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Toughest areas	% failing	vs model overall
Bournemouth (BH)	43.8%	+12.6 pp
Newport (NP)	43.71%	+12.5 pp
London SE (SE)	43.33%	+12.1 pp
Salisbury (SP)	42.45%	+11.3 pp
Dorchester (DT)	41.76%	+10.6 pp

Easiest areas	% failing	vs model overall
Romford (RM)	16.94%	-14.3 pp
Dartford (DA)	17.59%	-13.6 pp
Twickenham (TW)	18.48%	-12.7 pp
Llandudno (LL)	18.85%	-12.3 pp
Lancaster (LA)	19.2%	-12.0 pp

Every dot is a postcode area — size = how many were tested there, colour = share failing. These figures are not age-adjusted: coastal and rural areas often run older fleets and salted roads, so higher raw fail rates do not automatically mean a worse local stock of this model.

Map labels: Scotland · N. England · Wales · London · S. West. Colour scale: 26%–40% failing.

Austin Mini faults that come together

Identification + Seatbelts & SRS stand out at 7.11×, against 1.00× if the faults were independent.

above 1.0× = more than expectedbelow 1.0× = less

Defects in «Lamps, reflectors and electrical equipment» and «Visibility» appear together 3.82× more often than chance (1,041 co-occurrences in the same test; lift≥1.3, n≥500).

Lift = how many times more often both groups appear on the same test than if independent. A pair is listed from 5 tests with both faults; the lift is shown from 20, and called above chance only when its 95% interval excludes 1 (see rough estimates).

Which Austin Mini engine is best?

petrol under 1.0 is highest at 105.0; petrol 1.0–1.2 is lowest at 52.1 — the gap is 52.9 points.

below 100 is betterabove 100 is worse100 = normal for this model at that age

Splitting this model by fuel alone hides the thing that actually differs. Within the same badge, the petrol under 1.0 runs at 105 against this model's own age norm while the petrol 1.0–1.2 runs at 52.1 — a spread of 52.9 points between two cars that share a name.

Read this one with more care than the rest of the page. Age is held constant, but who buys which engine is not: the largest capacity in a range is often a performance or executive variant that is garaged, cherished and lightly driven, while the smallest is frequently a fleet or entry car worked hard from new. The gap below is real in the test records; how much of it is the engine and how much is the owner, this data cannot separate. Bands under 100 tests are not shown; bands under 5,000 tests are rough estimates.

Austin Mini MOT repair costs

The MOT-failure repair budget per test runs from £152.94 to £290.59, against £54.85 for the test itself.

bigger number = costs morepounds per test, MOT-failing faults only

Multiply how often each component fails on this model by what that repair usually costs, and you get the amount an owner should expect to budget per test for MOT-failing faults only — roughly £153 to £291, on top of the test fee itself. It is a budgeting figure, not a quote: the spread between a set of pads and a set of discs is most of the range.

Prices are modal quotes from a hand-kept catalogue of published UK garage guides — we do not scrape the booking sites, their terms forbid it, so this list is short and updated by hand with a source and date against each line. Each line prices one typical repair in that group, not a full remedy, and only groups our catalogue actually covers are counted. The contrast worth noticing is the second card: the legal maximum for the test has been £54.85 since 2010, while the repairs it uncovers have followed inflation the whole time.

For scale from a different direction: Warrantywise, which sees used-car warranty claims rather than test failures, puts the average claim at £2,052 across the ten highest-claim models it ranks and £539 for Honda, the lowest-claim make in its index (Warrantywise index 2026, 1.6 million claims, cars aged 3–15). Those sit an order of magnitude above the figures in this table, and the gap is the point: a warranty claim is a gearbox or an engine, which almost never fails an MOT, while the faults that do fail one are corrosion, lamps and tyres, which no warranty pays for. The two numbers answer different questions and neither replaces the other.

Austin Mini rust problems: where they corrode

Age-standardised corrosion susceptibility is well below the reference at <0.1×, against 1.00× for the national age-standardised rate.

above 1.0× = rusts more than averagebelow 1.0× = rusts less

This Austin Mini virtually never fails on corrosion once age is held constant, and its owners live in areas that are gentler than most for the models we publish.

Corrosion is the one failure mode that is as much about geography as about the car. We keep the two apart on purpose: a model can look rusty simply because it is popular in Scotland, and a model can look clean simply because it is bought in Surrey. Blending them into a single score would hide which of the two is doing the work.

Exposure is this model's tests weighted by an area corrosion index built from frost days, salt load and distance to the coast — the composite validated at r = 0.42 against corrosion defects we actually record. It is published as a rank, not a raw score, because every mainstream model skews towards low-corrosion areas for the simple reason that most of Britain's cars are in the south. Susceptibility is standardised to the national age profile, so an old fleet does not get labelled a rusty model.

Does an Austin Mini advisory become a failure?

Body, chassis, structure are highest at 19.6%; Non-component advisories are lowest at 0.0% — the gap is 19.6 percentage points.

higher = more likelypercentage is the observed transition probability

chance the same component fails at the next MOT, given an advisory now

This is the question an advisory note actually raises, and it needs six years of test history to answer. We followed the same vehicles from one MOT to the next across 2019–2024 and measured how often a component that was merely advised came back as a genuine failure at the next test.

Read it as a budgeting horizon, not a prophecy: the most likely component above turns into a failure for about 20 in 100 cars, and the median gap is 12.3 months and roughly 322 miles. The rest were repaired, sold, scrapped, or simply held. Rows with fewer than 500 tracked advisories are not shown.

What will fail next on an Austin Mini?

Lamps, reflectors and electrical equipment after a failure at age 20+ are highest at 22.1%; Suspension after a passed at age 20+ is lowest at 6.1% — the gap is 15.9 percentage points.

higher = more likelypercentage is the observed transition probability

The same chains, cut differently: given a car's age and how its last test went, which component most often causes trouble at the following one.

The pattern that repeats across every family: a failure at one test roughly doubles the chance of a failure on the same component at the next one, and an advisory sits about half-way between a clean pass and a failure. Age bands in years; probabilities are per car, not per defect item.

Austin Mini ownership: what six years of MOTs show

The ten-day re-test pass rate is highest at 68.6%; The later re-test pass rate is lowest at 12.1% — the gap is 56.5 percentage points.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Failing is usually a same-week event, not a disaster. Of 4,313 failures followed through to their re-test, 19.36% were repaired and passed the same day and 68.56% within ten days; the median gap is 3 days. 16,580 defect items were cleared in the process.

Per mile driven, not per year. Dividing failures by the miles that actually went onto the odometers between consecutive tests gives 2.536 failures per 10,000 miles, on a median of 261 miles a year across 4,846 chains. This is the number to compare between models — an annual rate quietly rewards cars that barely leave the drive.

Two populations hide inside one model. 45.27% of these cars strung together three or more tests with nothing recorded at all, while 21.82% carried the same advisory three times or more — the same fault, noted, ignored, noted again. When you buy used you are buying one of those two histories, and the MOT record shows which.

Odometer anomalies: 4.786% of 5,056 chains show a reading lower than the previous test, with a median drop of 13,138 miles. We call this an anomaly and not fraud on purpose — instrument swaps, imports, unit mix-ups and keying errors all land in the same bucket. Obvious typos (drops under 100 miles or over 90% of the reading) are already excluded.

Austin Mini MOT: quick answers

Austin Mini MOT Risk Index is well below the reference at 79.5, against 100 for a car with the same age profile.

below 100 is betterabove 100 is worse100 = normal for this model at that age

What is the Austin Mini first-time MOT pass rate?

72.25% of first attempts passed in 2024 (3,031 tests). This is the first-time figure: retests after repair are excluded. Basis: first-time, excluding retests.

Why does this number differ from other sites?

Other sites often report a pass rate that includes retests or counts all attempts. Our 27.75% figure is the first-time initial failure rate, using 3,031 primary tests as the denominator (first-time, excluding retests). The age-adjusted MOT initial-failure ratio 79.5 is shown separately because raw rates compare fleet age as well as cars.

Compare the Austin Mini with other cars

Toyota Alphard is highest at 79.8; Audi e-tron is lowest at 79.2 — the gap is 0.6 points.

below 100 is betterabove 100 is worse100 = normal for this model at that age

Similar risk

BMW X4 (index 79.7)Audi e-tron (index 79.2)Toyota Alphard (index 79.8)

Same size class

how Mercedes-Benz CL compareshow Jaguar XJS compareshow Honda Stepwagon compares

By area

Austin Mini MOT failure rate by postcode area

By failure group

Austin Mini body, chassis and structure failuresAustin Mini brakes failuresAustin Mini vehicle identification failuresAustin Mini lamps, reflectors and electrics failuresAustin Mini noise, emissions and leaks failuresAustin Mini road wheels failuresAustin Mini seat belts and airbags failuresAustin Mini steering failuresAustin Mini suspension failuresAustin Mini tyres failuresAustin Mini visibility failures