Fiat 500 — MOT statistics 2024

The Fiat 500 failed 31.68% of 477,588 first MOT attempts in 2024 ("first-time", excluding retests). Adjusted for the age of the fleet, its initial-failure ratio is 116.2 (100 = expected for its age profile). This car fails its MOT about 16% more often than expected for its age.

Age-adjusted peer: Volkswagen Polo (index 114.8) — the two published results are 1.4 index points apart.

Fiat 500 common problems: what actually fails the MOT

Suspension stands out at 30.5 per 100 tests, against 19.9 per 100 tests nationally.

higher bar = fails more oftenrate per 100 tests

family vs national — top component groups, per 100 tests. Legend: This family · National avg.

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

Fiat 500 MOT advisories: what gets flagged

Tyres are highest at 486.8 per 100 tests; Non-component advisories are lowest at 8.6 per 100 tests — the gap is 478.2 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.

How does the Fiat 500 perform as it gets older?

At age 9 stands out at 32.4%, against 24.4% for all cars of the same age.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

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

Takeaway: a 10-year-old 500 has roughly a 34% chance of failing its MOT; from about age 5 it stays above the national age curve.

Fiat 500 petrol vs diesel: which ages best

Diesel is highest at 41.5%; Petrol is lowest at 31.6% — the gap is 9.9 percentage points.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Chart sample sizes: n=471k · n=6,553.

How dangerous are Fiat 500 MOT failures?

Minor defects stand out at 13.4 per 100 tests, against 24.4 per 100 tests nationally.

higher bar = fails more oftenrate per 100 tests

Chart values: Minor 13.4 · Major 69.3 · Dangerous 13.4.

Per 100 tests on this family. National average: Minor 24.4 · Major 63.3 · Dangerous 12.9 per 100.

Does the month of a Fiat 500 MOT matter?

Nov is highest at 33.7%; Mar is lowest at 29.5% — the gap is 4.2 percentage points.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Chart scale: 23%–35%.

bars: Fiat 500 · dashed: all class-4 cars

Takeaway: the spread between best and worst month is 4.2 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 19.5% of these cars were first registered in March with another17% in September — 37% 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. Peaks here mark when cars are tested, not when they are worse.

Fiat 500 average mileage by age

At age 8, the middle half of 500s runs from 30,754 miles to 55,314 miles, against 42,382 miles as the median.

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

Chart axes: car age, years · odometer scale 0–111k mi.

Does high mileage mean more Fiat 500 MOT failures?

Same age band (6–14 years), split by odometer — this separates wear from age: 20.5% of the lowest-mileage cars failed versus 44.6% of the highest.

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

A typical 8-year-old 500 has ~42,382 miles on the clock. Much more — ask why; much less — check for gaps in the MOT history.

Where in Britain the Fiat 500 fails its MOT most

Kirkcaldy area is highest at 43.3%; Uxbridge area is lowest at 21.9% — the gap is 21.4 percentage points.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Toughest areas	% failing	vs model overall
Kirkcaldy (KY)	43.26%	+11.6 pp
Aberdeen (AB)	40.31%	+8.6 pp
Brighton (BN)	37.68%	+6.0 pp
Bristol (BS)	37.63%	+6.0 pp
Edinburgh (EH)	37.6%	+5.9 pp

Easiest areas	% failing	vs model overall
Uxbridge (UB)	21.89%	-9.8 pp
Twickenham (TW)	22.98%	-8.7 pp
Enfield (EN)	23.69%	-8.0 pp
London E (E)	24.4%	-7.3 pp
Southend-on-Sea (SS)	24.79%	-6.9 pp

Why do areas differ?

For each external factor we correlate the area fail rate with the factor across postcode areas that have ≥800 tests of this family, then compare the bottom vs top fifth (quintile) of the factor. Correlation, not causation — factors travel together (the north is colder and often poorer; urban areas are denser and less salted). Road surface condition is joined now, for the 91 English areas the DfT publishes, and it explains nothing: the correlation with suspension failures is −0.01 and with body and structure failures 0.07. Potholes wreck wheels and tyres between tests, but by the time a car reaches the bay the road it drives on leaves no measurable trace.

In areas with the highest mot centre density this model fails 8.9 pp more often than in the lowest fifth (r=0.66, n=112 areas with ≥800 tests).

In areas with the highest urban share this model fails 7.0 pp less often than in the lowest fifth (r=-0.48, n=112 areas with ≥800 tests).

In areas with the highest frost days this model fails 4.5 pp more often than in the lowest fifth (r=0.45, n=112 areas with ≥800 tests).

Values shown in the quintile chart

Factor	Low Q	High Q	Gap	Correlation
MOT centre density	26.6%	35.5%	+8.9 pp	r=0.66
Urban share	33.9%	27.0%	-6.9 pp	r=-0.48
Frost days	30.7%	35.2%	+4.5 pp	r=0.45

Factors that only mean something combined

Some conditions are useless on their own and informative multiplied together. Frost days alone say little — Britain barely freezes. Salt tonnage alone says little — it tracks frost. Distance to the sea alone says little. Multiply the first two and divide by the third and you get an index of how hard an area attacks a car's underside, and it lines up with the corrosion defects we actually record. We built five such combinations and tested each against our own data. Three survived; two did not, and the failures are listed here on purpose — a proxy that was never checked is decoration. One survivor only survived on the second attempt: built from a crude stand-in for street parking it failed outright, and rebuilt from the census — terraced streets carrying more cars than they have driveways — it works, and carries information the salt index does not.

Composite area indicators, each tested against a defect rate we measure

Composite	Built from	Tested against	r	Verdict
Underbody corrosion	frost days × salt load ÷ (distance to coast + 1)	share of tests with a corrosion defect	+0.42	holds (116 areas)
Tyre wear	rain days × annual miles ÷ age at first tyre advisory	share of tests failing on tyres	+0.45	holds (116 areas)
Overnight corrosion	terraced housing × cars per household × frost days	share with a corrosion defect	+0.41	holds (102 areas) — and adds signal beyond the first index
Deferred maintenance	deprivation × advisory-to-failure conversion ÷ labour rate	cars repeating the same advisory	−0.26	fails (118 areas)
Powertrain stress	engine capacity ÷ kerb weight	suspension, brake and emissions failures	−0.16	fails (22 models)

The deprivation result is the one worth dwelling on. The intuition that poorer areas defer repairs is strong enough that most people treat it as established. We tested it twice — once on raw failure rates (r = 0.04) and again, more fairly, on whether an advisory turns into a failure — and it did not hold any of the three times we tried it — on raw failure rates, on advisory-to-failure conversion, and again with deprivation measured properly inside each nation rather than England alone. We are closing it. What does predict local failure rates is the density of test centres, which is a statement about testing, not about cars.

All external-factor correlations (machine-readable)

Factor	r	n areas	Low-Q fail %	High-Q fail %	Gap pp	Low-Q factor	High-Q factor
MOT centre density (per 10k vehicles)	0.664	112	26.6	35.5	+8.9	5	8.4
Urban share (0–1)	-0.478	112	33.9	27.0	-7.0	0.4	1
Frost days (days/year)	0.449	112	30.7	35.2	+4.5	11.6	37.5
Road-salt proxy (g/m²-yr)	0.444	112	29.4	35.4	+6.0	221.2	663.5
Terrain gradient (% grade)	0.339	66	32.2	36.0	+3.8	0.5	3.7
Distance to coast (km)	-0.309	112	34.5	31.2	-3.3	6.2	79.5
Income deprivation (score)	0.032	97	30.9	31.4	+0.4	0.1	0.2

Deprivation uses England IMD 2019 income score only (Scotland SIMD is a different scale). Salt proxy is a simplified NWSRG-style dry-salt sum from air Tmin; coastalness is distance from the area centroid to the nearest coastline.

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: 24%–38% failing.

Fiat 500 survival: which cars are still on the road

By age 16 stands out at 71.4%, against 100% at the ages 4–6 reference level.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Chart axes: car age, years · survival vs ages 4–6 · scale 0–105%.

By age 16, only about 71% as many cars of this family present for MOT as at ages 4–6 (reference n≈23,858); survivors still fail at 42.8% vs 11.2% at age 4. Older cars that still appear are a selected subset — weaker ones have already left. DfT licensed stock is 98% of its 2024 Q4 peak (431,169 → 423,199).

How many miles does a Fiat 500 last?

100,000+ miles is highest at 6.8%; 150,000+ miles is lowest at 0.3% — the gap is 6.6 percentage points.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Of 474,994 tests of this family with a usable odometer in 2024, 6.8% had already reached 100k miles, 0.3% reached 150k, and 0.0% reached 200k — a cross-section of cars still presenting for MOT, not a full birth cohort.

How many years is a Fiat 500 likely to last?

Bought at age 5 is highest at 11.2 years; Bought at age 15 is lowest at 1.2 years — the gap is 10 years.

bigger number = longer remaining lifeyears on the observed survival curve

estimateEstimate only — not a warranty: a typical 10-year-old example of this family (~55,520 miles median) has about 6.2 expected years of further MOT-present life on the 2024 survival curve. Derived from how many cars of each age still appear for test, not from a longitudinal panel.

Fiat 500 faults that come together

Body & structure + Emissions & leaks stand out at 13.74×, against 1× if the faults were independent.

above 1.0× = more than expectedbelow 1.0× = less

Defects in «Body, chassis, structure» and «Noise, emissions and leaks» appear together 13.74× more often than chance (3,533 co-occurrences in the same test; lift≥1.3, n≥300).

Lift = how many times more often both groups appear on the same test than if independent. Thresholds: lift ≥ 1.3, co-occurrences ≥ 300.

Is low mileage better for a Fiat 500?

Cars driven under 5,000 miles a year stands out at 24.1%, against 38.9% for cars driven 8,000–12,000 miles a year.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

At matched ages 5–14, cars averaging under 5k miles/year fail at 24.1% vs 38.9% for 8–12k miles/year — 14.8 pp lower (n_low=179,134, n_normal=52,002). In this family low annual use is associated with fewer MOT fails, not more — the ‘garage queen’ penalty is not visible in overall fail rates.

Fiat 500 real MPG against official fuel economy

petrol/electric (2021) real-world fuel use stands out at +212.91%, against 0% for an exact match to the official figure.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Since 2021 every new car in Europe records its own fuel use, and the regulator publishes what those meters say next to the laboratory figure the car was sold on. For this manufacturer the worst gap is 18.06% — petrol cars of 2021 burning 6.82 litres per 100 km against an official 5.78, with CO₂ higher by the same proportion.

This is the manufacturer, not the model. The regulator aggregates by legal manufacturer (FIAT GROUP), so these figures are context for the badge rather than a measurement of this particular car — a point we would rather state plainly than let a reader assume otherwise. The gap itself is not a scandal, it is the known distance between a standardised laboratory cycle and real roads, but it is the distance you actually pay for at the pump. The plug-in hybrid rows are not a data error and deserve a sentence of their own: an official figure of 1.99 litres assumes the car spends most of its life on the battery, and the meters say these ones burned 6.23. Owners are not plugging them in, and a plug-in hybrid that is never charged is simply a heavy petrol car. Source: European Environment Agency (EEA), Real-world CO2 emissions from new cars and vans, reporting year 2024, v3, 2023_Cars_Aggregated.csv, CC BY 4.0 — copyright holder: European Environment Agency (EEA).

Best year for a Fiat 500, and the years to avoid

Build year 2009 is highest at 106.6; Build year 2019 is lowest at 82.4 — the gap is 24.2 points.

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

build year vs the same model at the same age · 100 = as expected

The best build year here is 2019 and the weakest is 2009. Comparing build years sounds simple and is not: within a single year of testing, a car's build year and its age are the same number, so a naive comparison of years is a comparison of ages wearing a disguise. Each year below is measured against the same model at the same age in other cohorts, across six years of testing — 13 of 13 years come out distinguishable from their own model's age norm.

Two limits worth knowing before you act on this. Age, test year and build year are locked together by arithmetic, so the test-year effect is taken from the observed national failure level of each year rather than estimated — it is an adjustment, not a solution. And for cars built before about 2005, a good score says more about which examples survived to be tested than about how that year was built: survivors are self-selected for care.

Fiat 500 MOT repair costs

The MOT-failure repair budget per test runs from £110.88 to £210.67, 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 £111 to £211, 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.

Fiat 500 running costs for a fleet

Vehicles failing at age 10 stand out at 34%, against 15% at age 5 in the same 100-vehicle fleet.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

The number a fleet manager needs is not the failure rate, it is the year the car starts costing more. Between age 7 and 8 the failure rate of this model jumps by 4.92 percentage points — the steepest single step in its life, and the natural planning point for replacement.

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.

Fiat 500 rust problems: where they corrode

Age-standardised corrosion susceptibility stands out at 0.64×, against 1× for the national age-standardised rate.

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

This Fiat 500 fails on corrosion much less often than average 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 a Fiat 500 advisory become a failure?

Suspension is highest at 22.3%; Identification of the vehicle is lowest at 4.4% — the gap is 18.0 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 22 in 100 cars, and the median gap is 12 months and roughly 4,703 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 a Fiat 500?

Suspension after a failure at age 12-14 is highest at 23.5%; Brakes after a passed at age <3 are lowest at 1.6% — the gap is 21.9 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.

Fiat 500 ownership: what six years of MOTs show

The ten-day re-test pass rate is highest at 51.3%; The later re-test pass rate is lowest at 2.4% — the gap is 48.9 percentage points.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Failing is usually a same-week event, not a disaster. Of 414,962 failures followed through to their re-test, 46.31% were repaired and passed the same day and 51.28% within ten days; the median gap is 1 day. 960,255 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 0.653 failures per 10,000 miles, on a median of 3,980 miles a year across 329,738 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. 34.79% of these cars strung together three or more tests with nothing recorded at all, while 35.25% 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: 1.141% of 329,812 chains show a reading lower than the previous test, with a median drop of 13,641 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.

Fiat 500 technical service bulletins: what dealers are told

NHTSA manufacturer communications are 287.

bigger number = more recorded dealer communicationsnot affected vehicles or confirmed faults

These are the issues the manufacturer fixes quietly: service communications sent to dealers without a public recall campaign. They show what the service network has been told even when the issue never became news.

United States · NHTSA manufacturer communications

Caveat worth stating plainly: this is NHTSA data about US-specification cars. British cars sold under the same name often use different gearboxes, engines and equipment, so a bulletin may describe a component that was never fitted here. The file counts dealer communications, not affected vehicles or confirmed failures, and it cannot tell you whether an individual UK car has the issue. A communication can carry more than one subject tag, so topic counts do not have to add up to the total. Source: NHTSA Manufacturer Communications API (US-market vehicles; queried model years 2015-2022). Licence: U.S. Government work / public domain · retrieved 2026-08-03.

Fiat 500 owner complaints: what goes wrong

Transmission (not MOT-tested) is highest at 43; Body & structure are lowest at 7 — the gap is 36.

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

Two different populations answering two different questions: the MOT records what an inspector can measure once a year, the complaint file records what annoyed or frightened an owner on the road. A component high in one column and absent from the other is the interesting case — driver-assistance and electronics dominate complaints while almost never appearing as an MOT failure item.

US owners have filed 124 complaints about the equivalent Fiat 500 to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, including 9 that mention a crash, 3 a fire and 7 an injury. These are owner reports, not verified findings — but they are the only large public record of what drivers themselves notice, and they cover the years between MOT tests.

Caveat worth stating plainly: US-specification cars, self-selected reporters, no denominator — complaint counts scale with how many cars were sold there and how motivated owners are to file. The mechanical gap matters as much as the statistical one: American cars of the same name often carry different gearboxes, engines and equipment — automatics where Britain buys manuals — so a drivetrain complaint filed in Ohio may describe a part that was never fitted here. Read the ranking inside a model, not between models, and treat drivetrain entries with particular caution. Source: NHTSA ODI consumer complaints (US market, public domain) — US-spec vehicles, indicative only.

Fiat 500 inspection results in other countries

Norway PKK stands out at 44.8%, against 33.5% nationally.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

The countries disagree about this car, and that is worth saying out loud rather than averaging away. A model can sit above its national average in one country and below it in another because the fleets are not the same cars: different model years, different engines, different roads and salt, and inspection rules that weight components differently. Treat each row as evidence from one regime, not as a verdict.

Useful as a cross-check on the UK defect table above: the categories are named differently, but a component that dominates in both regimes is a genuine weak point of the model rather than an artefact of one country's testing style.

Worth dwelling on how mundane the top of that list is: tyre pressure, tread depth, headlight aim. The Dutch APK records 1.067 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 Fiat 500 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: Traficom — Periodic inspections of cars by model / by model and fault object 2024, CC BY 4.0; 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.

Fiat 500 MOT: quick answers

Fiat 500 MOT Risk Index stands out at 116.2, 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 Fiat 500 first-time MOT pass rate?

68.32% of first attempts passed in 2024 (477,588 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 31.68% figure is the first-time initial failure rate, using 477,588 primary tests as the denominator (first-time, excluding retests). The age-adjusted MOT initial-failure ratio 116.2 is shown separately because raw rates compare fleet age as well as cars.

Compare the Fiat 500 with other cars

Vauxhall Zafira is highest at 118.6; Volkswagen Polo is lowest at 114.8 — the gap is 3.8 points.

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

Similar risk

Volkswagen Polo (index 114.8)Ford Fiesta (index 117.8)Vauxhall Zafira (index 118.6)

Same size class

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