Citroen C5 Aircross — MOT statistics 2024

The Citroen C5 Aircross failed 11.99% of 3,311 first MOT attempts in 2024 ("first-time", excluding retests). Adjusted for the age of the fleet, its initial-failure ratio is 97.5 (100 = expected for its age profile). This car is too close to call — statistically indistinguishable from normal for its age. Small sample — treat with care.

Age-adjusted peer: Citroen C1 (index 97.5) — the two published results are 0.0 index points apart.

Citroen C5 Aircross common problems: what actually fails the MOT

Tyres stand out at 7.3 per 100 tests, against 5.6 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.

Citroen C5 Aircross MOT advisories: what gets flagged

Tyres are highest at 40.0 per 100 tests; Non-component advisories are lowest at 7.7 per 100 tests — the gap is 32.3 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.

Tyres, brakes and suspension: Citroen C5 Aircross against cars of the same age

Failing items per 100 initial tests, 2019-2024. The comparison group is every petrol or diesel car tested at the same age, so weight and drivetrain show up rather than fleet age.

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 3,638 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.

Mileage matters here: matching on how much these are driven moves the figure by 5.2 points — this fleet works harder than the vehicles it is measured against, so the age-only view penalises it — but it does not change which side of normal the car sits on. 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 the Citroen C5 Aircross compares with cars of its own age and size

Not against the whole fleet — against cars of the same size class tested at the same age, 2019-2024.

Raw first-time failure rates within each age, so fleet age cannot flatter either side. A positive difference means this model fails more often than its own class at that age.

How does the Citroen C5 Aircross perform as it gets older?

The C5 Aircross at age 3 is close to the reference at 12.1%, against 12.4% for all vehicles of the same age.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Chart axes: car age, years · failure-rate scale 0–14%.

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

How dangerous are Citroen C5 Aircross MOT failures?

Major defects are well below the reference at 8.4 per 100 tests, against 52.8 per 100 tests nationally.

higher bar = fails more oftenrate per 100 tests

Chart values: Minor 4.0 · Major 8.3 · Dangerous 6.7.

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

Does the month of a Citroen C5 Aircross MOT matter?

Jun is highest at 14.2%; Feb is lowest at 8.6% — the gap is 5.6 percentage points.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Chart scale: 7%–33%.

bars: Citroen C5 Aircross · dashed: all class-4 cars

Takeaway: the spread between best and worst month is 5.6 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.

Citroen C5 Aircross average mileage by age

At age 3, the middle half of C5 Aircross models runs from 17,673 miles to 35,618 miles, against 25,505 miles as the median.

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

Does high mileage mean more Citroen C5 Aircross MOT failures at the same age?

Within the same age group, split by odometer (2024 MOTs), so this separates wear from age: at ages 3–5, 11.1% of those with under 40,000 miles failed first time versus 16.3% of those with 40,000–70,000 miles.Inside this age group, higher mileage goes with more failures.

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

A typical 3-year-old C5 Aircross has ~25,505 miles on the clock. Much more — ask why; much less — check for gaps in the MOT history.

Where in Britain the Citroen C5 Aircross fails its MOT most

Too few tests in any single postcode area to name one, so this is the wider picture across 3,641 tests, 2019-2024.

Raw pass/fail rates, not age-adjusted: fleets differ by region. England is split north of Sheffield, between Sheffield and Oxford, and south of it.

Citroen C5 Aircross survival: which cars are still on the road

By age 5 is well below the reference at 62.9%, against 100.0% at the ages 4–6 reference level.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Ages 4–6 average 89 tests, too few for an 'only X% as many' claim. The rows are the counts of cars still coming to an MOT.

How many years is a Citroen C5 Aircross likely to last?

Bought at age 5 stands out at 0.5 years.

bigger number = longer remaining lifeyears on the observed survival curve

estimateObserved only until age 5. The curve does not run five years past the stated age with the share still tested under 50%, so no 'years left' number is given.

Citroen C5 Aircross faults that come together

Defects in «Brakes» and «Tyres» were seen together in 16 tests (55 pairs compared).

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).

Citroen C5 Aircross MOT repair costs

The MOT-failure repair budget per test runs from £16.18 to £30.74, 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 £16 to £31, 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.

Citroen C5 Aircross rust problems: where they corrode

Salt-belt exposure stands out at 72nd percentile, against 50th percentile as the middle of published models.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

This Citroen C5 Aircross has too few tests to judge for corrosion once age is held constant, and its owners live in areas that are saltier 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.

What will fail next on a Citroen C5 Aircross?

Lamps, reflectors and electrical equipment after a passed at age 3-5 are highest at 11.0%; Lamps, reflectors and electrical equipment after a passed at age <3 are lowest at 1.7% — the gap is 9.2 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.

Citroen C5 Aircross safety recalls and how to check yours

DVSA recall campaigns stand out at 21.

bigger number = more recorded casescompare like-for-like scope, not sample size alone

recall campaigns launched per year

DVSA lists 21 safety recall campaigns for the Citroen C5 Aircross, covering roughly 16,513 vehicles in total. A recall is the manufacturer fixing a fault for free, so an open recall on your car costs nothing to clear.

Counter-intuitive, and measured on our own data: across the 25 families published here, more recalls go with a lower MOT Risk Index (r = −0.52). Heavily recalled models are not worse cars in the test bay — an active manufacturer removes the fault before it becomes an MOT failure.

Check whether a specific car has an outstanding recall — free, by registration — at DVSA's recall service. Source: DVSA vehicle safety recalls (check-vehicle-recalls.service.gov.uk), OGL.

Citroen C5 Aircross inspection results in other countries

Netherlands APK is well below the reference at 33.0%, against 50.8% nationally.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

The verdict is consistent across every regime where the difference is clear, which is the strongest form this comparison takes: independent inspectorates, different rulebooks, same direction of travel.

Worth dwelling on how mundane the top of that list is: tyre pressure, tread depth, headlight aim. The Dutch APK records 0.751 defects per inspection against a much higher national failure rate than Britain's, and the reason is not that Dutch cars are worse — it is that the two regimes draw the line between "note it" and "fail it" in different places. Codes are the RDW's own; the English wording here is our translation of the Dutch original.

Britain is not the only country that inspects every car every year, and the Citroen C5 Aircross is on the road in all of them. Each national regime writes its own rules, so the pass rates below are not comparable to each other — what does travel across a border is whether a model sits above or below its own country's average.

Rows with fewer than 500 inspections are not published. Sources: RDW open data — Meldingen Keuringsinstantie + Geconstateerde Gebreken + Gekentekende voertuigen (2024), CC0. Not an RDW endorsement.; Statens vegvesen — Periodisk kjøretøykontroll (PKK) 2024, CC BY 4.0. Adapted; licences and full notice.

Citroen C5 Aircross MOT: quick answers

Citroen C5 Aircross MOT Risk Index is close to the reference at 97.5, 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 Citroen C5 Aircross first-time MOT pass rate?

88.01% of first attempts passed in 2024 (3,311 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 11.99% figure is the first-time initial failure rate, using 3,311 primary tests as the denominator (first-time, excluding retests). The age-adjusted MOT initial-failure ratio 97.5 is shown separately because raw rates compare fleet age as well as cars.

Compare the Citroen C5 Aircross with other cars

Volkswagen ID.4 is highest at 97.5; Citroen C5 Aircross is lowest at 97.5 — the gap is 0.0 points.

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

Same brand

All Citroen MOT statisticsCitroen C1 MOT statsCitroen C3 Aircross MOT stats

Similar risk

Citroen C1 (index 97.5)Toyota Starlet (index 97.5)Volkswagen ID.4 (index 97.5)

Same size class

how Iveco Daily compareshow Lexus LS compareshow Peugeot 205 compares

By area

Citroen C5 Aircross MOT failure rate by postcode area

By failure group

Citroen C5 Aircross body, chassis and structure failuresCitroen C5 Aircross brakes failuresCitroen C5 Aircross lamps, reflectors and electrics failuresCitroen C5 Aircross tyres failuresCitroen C5 Aircross visibility failures

Inspections abroad

Citroen C5 Aircross in NorwayCitroen C5 Aircross in the Netherlands