Mercedes-Benz 190 — MOT statistics 2024

The Mercedes-Benz 190 failed 27.4% of 2,562 first MOT attempts in 2024 ("first-time", excluding retests). Adjusted for the age of the fleet, its initial-failure ratio is 79.0 (100 = expected for its age profile). This car fails its MOT about 21% less often than expected for its age. Small sample — treat with care.

Age-adjusted peer: Mitsubishi Mirage (index 79.0) — the two published results are 0.0 index points apart.

Mercedes-Benz 190 common problems: what actually fails the MOT

Lamps, reflectors and electrical equipment are well below the reference at 21.1 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.

Mercedes-Benz 190 MOT advisories: what gets flagged

Brakes are highest at 51.4 per 100 tests; Non-component advisories are lowest at 8.3 per 100 tests — the gap is 43.1 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 does not clearly change next year's odds here (26.2% against 23.4%): the difference is within the margin of error. The failure most likely to come back is tyres — 28.8% 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 11,147 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 matters here: matching on how much these are driven moves the figure by 6.6 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 does the Mercedes-Benz 190 perform as it gets older?

The 190 at age 20 is well below the reference at 21.7%, 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 Mercedes-Benz 190 MOT failures?

Major defects stand out at 73.1 per 100 tests, against 52.8 per 100 tests nationally.

higher bar = fails more oftenrate per 100 tests

Chart values: Minor 17.2 · Major 73.1 · Dangerous 8.4.

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

Does the month of a Mercedes-Benz 190 MOT matter?

Nov is highest at 31.0%; Aug is lowest at 27.7% — the gap is 3.4 percentage points.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Chart scale: 26%–33%.

bars: Mercedes-Benz 190 · dashed: all class-4 cars

Takeaway: the spread between best and worst month is 3.4 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.

Mercedes-Benz 190 average mileage by age

At age 20+, the middle half of 190s runs from 68,525 miles to 140,594 miles, against 100,319 miles as the median.

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

Does high mileage mean more Mercedes-Benz 190 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+, 20.9% of those with 70,000–100,000 miles failed first time versus 29% of those with over 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 190 has ~100,319 miles on the clock. Much more — ask why; much less — check for gaps in the MOT history.

Where in Britain the Mercedes-Benz 190 fails its MOT most

Bath area is highest at 45.3%; London E area is lowest at 16.5% — the gap is 28.8 percentage points.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Toughest areas	% failing	vs model overall
Bath (BA)	45.31%	+16.1 pp
Llandudno (LL)	42.86%	+13.6 pp
Bournemouth (BH)	42.01%	+12.8 pp
Gloucester (GL)	40.76%	+11.5 pp
Exeter (EX)	38.51%	+9.3 pp

Easiest areas	% failing	vs model overall
London E (E)	16.51%	-12.7 pp
Harrow (HA)	16.78%	-12.4 pp
Enfield (EN)	17.89%	-11.3 pp
Birmingham (B)	19.12%	-10.1 pp
Blackburn (BB)	19.23%	-10.0 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: 19%–42% failing.

How many miles does a Mercedes-Benz 190 last?

100,000+ miles is highest at 65.7%; 200,000+ miles is lowest at 7.5% — the gap is 58.2 percentage points.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Of 13,416 tests of this family with a usable odometer in 2024, 65.7% had reached 100k miles, 27.8% had reached 150k miles, 7.5% had reached 200k miles. This is a cross-section of cars still presenting for MOT, not a full birth cohort.

Mercedes-Benz 190 faults that come together

Identification + Visibility stand out at 5.51×, against 1.00× if the faults were independent.

above 1.0× = more than expectedbelow 1.0× = less

Defects in «Brakes» and «Lamps, reflectors and electrical equipment» appear together 3.57× more often than chance (559 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 Mercedes-Benz 190 engine is best?

diesel over 2.0 is highest at 119.6; petrol over 2.0 is lowest at 84.5 — the gap is 35.1 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 diesel over 2.0 runs at 119.6 against this model's own age norm while the petrol over 2.0 runs at 84.5 — a spread of 35.1 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.

Mercedes-Benz 190 MOT repair costs

The MOT-failure repair budget per test runs from £107.31 to £203.89, 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 £107 to £204, 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.

Mercedes-Benz 190 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 Mercedes-Benz 190 virtually never fails on corrosion once age is held constant, and its owners live in areas that are about typical 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 Mercedes-Benz 190 advisory become a failure?

Suspension is highest at 17.9%; Non-component advisories are lowest at 0.0% — the gap is 17.9 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 18 in 100 cars, and the median gap is 12 months and roughly 994 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 Mercedes-Benz 190?

Lamps, reflectors and electrical equipment after a failure at age 20+ are highest at 17.6%; Brakes after a passed at age 20+ are lowest at 5.3% — the gap is 12.4 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.

Mercedes-Benz 190 ownership: what six years of MOTs show

The ten-day re-test pass rate is highest at 69.9%; The later re-test pass rate is lowest at 12.5% — the gap is 57.4 percentage points.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Failing is usually a same-week event, not a disaster. Of 2,324 failures followed through to their re-test, 17.6% were repaired and passed the same day and 69.88% within ten days; the median gap is 3 days. 6,516 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 1.344 failures per 10,000 miles, on a median of 901 miles a year across 3,406 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. 30.66% of these cars strung together three or more tests with nothing recorded at all, while 27.5% 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: 3.312% of 3,533 chains show a reading lower than the previous test, with a median drop of 29,181 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.

Mercedes-Benz 190 safety recalls and how to check yours

DVSA recall campaigns stand out at 1.

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

DVSA lists 1 safety recall campaigns for the Mercedes-Benz 190, covering roughly 285 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.

Mercedes-Benz 190 inspection results in other countries

Netherlands APK stands out at 63.6%, against 50.8% nationally.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

In at least one country the difference from the national average is within the margin of error (95% interval), so these rows do not settle the model's position; each is evidence from one rulebook.

Worth dwelling on how mundane the top of that list is: tyre pressure, tread depth, headlight aim. The Dutch APK records 1.812 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 Mercedes-Benz 190 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.

One caveat before you read the UK row: these are raw failure rates, because no other country publishes the age detail our index needs. This model's raw UK rate looks worse than the national average while its age-adjusted index is 79.0 — the fleet here is unusually old, and the raw column silently credits that. The index above is the fair comparison; this table is for reading each country against itself.

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.. Adapted; licences and full notice.

Mercedes-Benz 190 MOT: quick answers

Mercedes-Benz 190 MOT Risk Index is well below the reference at 79.0, 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 Mercedes-Benz 190 first-time MOT pass rate?

72.6% of first attempts passed in 2024 (2,562 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 27.4% figure is the first-time initial failure rate, using 2,562 primary tests as the denominator (first-time, excluding retests). The age-adjusted MOT initial-failure ratio 79.0 is shown separately because raw rates compare fleet age as well as cars.

Compare the Mercedes-Benz 190 with other cars

Audi e-tron is highest at 79.2; Mercedes-Benz 190 is lowest at 79.0 — the gap is 0.2 points.

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

Same brand

All Mercedes-Benz MOT statisticsMercedes-Benz GLS MOT statsMercedes-Benz E-Class MOT stats

Similar risk

Mitsubishi Mirage (index 79.0)Audi A5 (index 79.1)Audi e-tron (index 79.2)

Same size class

how Citroen 2CV compareshow Nissan Serena compareshow Aston Martin DB11 compares

By area

Mercedes-Benz 190 MOT failure rate by postcode area

By failure group

Mercedes-Benz 190 body, chassis and structure failuresMercedes-Benz 190 brakes failuresMercedes-Benz 190 vehicle identification failuresMercedes-Benz 190 lamps, reflectors and electrics failuresMercedes-Benz 190 noise, emissions and leaks failuresMercedes-Benz 190 road wheels failuresMercedes-Benz 190 seat belts and airbags failuresMercedes-Benz 190 steering failuresMercedes-Benz 190 suspension failuresMercedes-Benz 190 tyres failuresMercedes-Benz 190 visibility failures

Inspections abroad

Mercedes-Benz 190 in the Netherlands