Mazda RX-7 — MOT statistics 2024

The Mazda RX-7 failed 14.98% of 574 first MOT attempts in 2024 ("first-time", excluding retests). Adjusted for the age of the fleet, its initial-failure ratio is 39.6 (100 = expected for its age profile). This car fails its MOT about 60% less often than expected for its age. Small sample — treat with care.

Age-adjusted peer: Audi RS4 (index 39.7) — the two published results are 0.1 index points apart.

Mazda RX-7 common problems: what actually fails the MOT

Suspension is well below the reference at 7.5 per 100 tests, against 23.4 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.

Mazda RX-7 MOT advisories: what gets flagged

Suspension is highest at 25.6 per 100 tests; Non-component advisories are lowest at 3.0 per 100 tests — the gap is 22.6 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 13.1 percentage points. The failure most likely to come back is suspension — 29.4% 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 3,258 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.

Mileage changes little here (+1.8 points): this fleet is driven about as much as the vehicles it is compared with. 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 Mazda RX-7 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 Mazda RX-7 perform as it gets older?

The RX-7 at age 20 is well below the reference at 15.3%, 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 Mazda RX-7 MOT failures?

Dangerous defects are well below the reference at 4.1 per 100 tests, against 11.2 per 100 tests nationally.

higher bar = fails more oftenrate per 100 tests

Chart values: Minor 10.1 · Major 52.8 · Dangerous 4.1.

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

Does the month of a Mazda RX-7 MOT matter?

Mar is highest at 24.5%; Dec is lowest at 16.3% — the gap is 8.3 percentage points.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Chart scale: 15%–33%.

bars: Mazda RX-7 · dashed: all class-4 cars

Takeaway: the spread between best and worst month is 8.3 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.

Mazda RX-7 average mileage by age

At age 20+, the middle half of RX-7s runs from 50,719 miles to 90,346 miles, against 70,044 miles as the median.

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

Does high mileage mean more Mazda RX-7 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+, 13.7% of those with 40,000–70,000 miles failed first time versus 14.5% of those with 100,000–140,000 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 RX-7 has ~70,044 miles on the clock. Much more — ask why; much less — check for gaps in the MOT history.

Where in Britain the Mazda RX-7 fails its MOT most

Too few tests in any single postcode area to name one, so this is the wider picture across 3,644 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.

How many miles does a Mazda RX-7 last?

100,000+ miles stands out at 29.5%.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Of 3,388 tests of this family with a usable odometer in 2024, 29.5% had reached 100k miles. This is a cross-section of cars still presenting for MOT, not a full birth cohort.

Mazda RX-7 faults that come together

Identification + Emissions & leaks stand out at 7.83×, against 1.00× if the faults were independent.

above 1.0× = more than expectedbelow 1.0× = less

Defects in «Identification of the vehicle» and «Noise, emissions and leaks» appear together 7.83× more often than chance (25 co-occurrences in the same test; 66 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).

Mazda RX-7 MOT repair costs

The MOT-failure repair budget per test runs from £80.58 to £153.10, 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 £81 to £153, 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.

Mazda RX-7 rust problems: where they corrode

Salt-belt exposure is well below the reference at 10th percentile, against 50th percentile as the middle of published models.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

This Mazda RX-7 has too few tests to judge for 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.

What will fail next on a Mazda RX-7?

Lamps, reflectors and electrical equipment after a advisory at age 20+ are highest at 13.9%; Visibility after a passed at age 15-19 is lowest at 2.6% — the gap is 11.3 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.

Mazda RX-7 ownership: what six years of MOTs show

Clean three-test streak is highest at 49.9%; Repeated the same advisory is lowest at 14.2% — the gap is 35.7 percentage points.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Per mile driven, not per year. Dividing failures by the miles that actually went onto the odometers between consecutive tests gives 0.979 failures per 10,000 miles, on a median of 465 miles a year across 793 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. 49.85% of these cars strung together three or more tests with nothing recorded at all, while 14.16% 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: 27.957% of 837 chains show a reading lower than the previous test, with a median drop of 36,726 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.

Mazda RX-7 MOT: quick answers

Mazda RX-7 MOT Risk Index is well below the reference at 39.6, 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 Mazda RX-7 first-time MOT pass rate?

85.02% of first attempts passed in 2024 (574 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 14.98% figure is the first-time initial failure rate, using 574 primary tests as the denominator (first-time, excluding retests). The age-adjusted MOT initial-failure ratio 39.6 is shown separately because raw rates compare fleet age as well as cars.

Compare the Mazda RX-7 with other cars

Subaru WRX is highest at 39.7; Toyota Supra is lowest at 39.5 — the gap is 0.2 points.

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

Same brand

All Mazda MOT statisticsMazda CX-30 MOT statsMazda MX-30 MOT stats

Similar risk

Audi RS4 (index 39.7)Subaru WRX (index 39.7)Toyota Supra (index 39.5)

Same size class

how Abarth 695 compareshow Renault R5 compareshow Lamborghini Aventador compares

By area

Mazda RX-7 MOT failure rate by postcode area

By failure group

Mazda RX-7 body, chassis and structure failuresMazda RX-7 brakes failuresMazda RX-7 vehicle identification failuresMazda RX-7 lamps, reflectors and electrics failuresMazda RX-7 noise, emissions and leaks failuresMazda RX-7 seat belts and airbags failuresMazda RX-7 steering failuresMazda RX-7 suspension failuresMazda RX-7 tyres failuresMazda RX-7 visibility failures