Cupra Formentor — MOT statistics 2024

The Cupra Formentor failed 10.36% of 6,920 first MOT attempts in 2024 ("first-time", excluding retests). Adjusted for the age of the fleet, its initial-failure ratio is 84.9 (100 = expected for its age profile). This car fails its MOT about 15% less often than expected for its age.

Age-adjusted peer: Audi A3 (index 84.8) — the two published results are 0.1 index points apart.

Cupra Formentor common problems: what actually fails the MOT

Suspension stands out at 2.3 per 100 tests, against 0.7 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.

Cupra Formentor MOT advisories: what gets flagged

Tyres are highest at 35.9 per 100 tests; Non-component advisories are lowest at 5.7 per 100 tests — the gap is 30.2 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: Cupra Formentor 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 7,162 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 5.9 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 Cupra Formentor 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 Cupra Formentor perform as it gets older?

The Formentor at age 4 is well below the reference at 8.4%, against 13.1% for all vehicles of the same age.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Chart axes: car age, years · failure-rate scale 0–16%.

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

How dangerous are Cupra Formentor 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 2.4 · Major 8.4 · Dangerous 5.1.

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

Does the month of a Cupra Formentor MOT matter?

Jul is highest at 12.2%; Mar is lowest at 7.8% — the gap is 4.4 percentage points.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Chart scale: 6%–33%.

bars: Cupra Formentor · dashed: all class-4 cars

Takeaway: the spread between best and worst month is 4.4 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.

Cupra Formentor average mileage by age

At age 4, the middle half of Formentors runs from 21,691 miles to 35,212 miles, against 28,693 miles as the median.

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

Does high mileage mean more Cupra Formentor 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, 9.9% of those with under 40,000 miles failed first time versus 19.2% of those with 70,000–100,000 miles.Inside this age group, higher mileage goes with more failures.

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

A typical 4-year-old Formentor has ~28,693 miles on the clock. Much more — ask why; much less — check for gaps in the MOT history.

Where in Britain the Cupra Formentor fails its MOT most

Leicester area is highest at 29.6%; Tonbridge area is lowest at 3.8% — the gap is 25.8 percentage points.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

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.

Cupra Formentor survival: which cars are still on the road

By age 4 is close to the reference at 100.0%, against 100.0% at the ages 4–6 reference level.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

By age 4, only about 100% as many cars of this family present for MOT as at ages 4–6 (reference n≈107); survivors still fail at 8.4% vs 8.4% at age 4. Older cars that still appear are a selected subset — weaker ones have already left.

How many years is a Cupra Formentor likely to last?

estimateObserved only until age 4. 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.

Cupra Formentor faults that come together

Lamps & electrical + Suspension stand out at 16.78×, 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 «Suspension» appear together 16.78× more often than chance (22 co-occurrences in the same test; 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).

Which Cupra Formentor engine is best?

petrol 1.2–1.5 is highest at 102.9; petrol 1.8–2.0 is lowest at 92.7 — the gap is 10.2 points.

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

No engine band clearly fails less or more for its age: the bands are within 5 index points of each other, or their 95% intervals overlap, so this page does not name a best or worst engine.

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.

Cupra Formentor MOT repair costs

The MOT-failure repair budget per test runs from £13.64 to £25.92, 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 £14 to £26, 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.

Cupra Formentor running costs for a fleet

Vehicles failing at age 4 are well below the reference at 8.0%, against 11.0% at age 3, tested in the same year.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

No single year stands out as the point where this model starts costing more: the year-to-year steps in its failure rate are too small or rest on too few tests to name one (D1 rule: a step is named only with at least 2,000 tests on both sides and a jump above 3 percentage points).

Repair spend uses the same modal prices as the section above, so it inherits the same limits: one typical repair per component group, not a full remedy. Downtime is the gap between the failed test and the passed re-test, which is the window a vehicle is legally off the road.

Cupra Formentor 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 Cupra Formentor virtually never fails on corrosion once age is held constant, and its owners live in areas that are saltier than most for the models we publish. Both point the same way and reinforce each other: it resists corrosion even though its owners live in saltier areas than most.

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 Cupra Formentor?

Tyres after a advisory at age <3 are highest at 6.5%; Noise, emissions and leaks after a passed at age <3 are lowest at 1.6% — the gap is 4.9 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.

Cupra Formentor ownership: what six years of MOTs show

The ten-day re-test pass rate is highest at 55.9%; The later re-test pass rate is lowest at 9.6% — the gap is 46.3 percentage points.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Failing is usually a same-week event, not a disaster. Of 551 failures followed through to their re-test, 34.48% were repaired and passed the same day and 55.9% within ten days; the median gap is 1 day. 880 defect items were cleared in the process.

Odometer anomalies: 0.199% of 503 chains show a reading lower than the previous test, with a median drop of 179,978 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.

Cupra Formentor MOT: quick answers

Cupra Formentor MOT Risk Index is well below the reference at 84.9, 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 Cupra Formentor first-time MOT pass rate?

89.64% of first attempts passed in 2024 (6,920 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 10.36% figure is the first-time initial failure rate, using 6,920 primary tests as the denominator (first-time, excluding retests). The age-adjusted MOT initial-failure ratio 84.9 is shown separately because raw rates compare fleet age as well as cars.

Compare the Cupra Formentor with other cars

Skoda Kamiq is highest at 85.3; Audi A3 is lowest at 84.8 — the gap is 0.5 points.

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

Similar risk

Audi A3 (index 84.8)Volvo XC70 (index 85.2)Skoda Kamiq (index 85.3)

Same size class

how Mercedes-Benz GLB compareshow Jeep Wrangler compareshow Alfa Romeo Giulia compares

By area

Cupra Formentor MOT failure rate by postcode area

By failure group

Cupra Formentor brakes failuresCupra Formentor lamps, reflectors and electrics failuresCupra Formentor noise, emissions and leaks failuresCupra Formentor seat belts and airbags failuresCupra Formentor suspension failuresCupra Formentor tyres failuresCupra Formentor visibility failures