Rover Mini — MOT statistics 2024

The Rover Mini failed 28.63% of 10,968 first MOT attempts in 2024 ("first-time", excluding retests). Adjusted for the age of the fleet, its initial-failure ratio is 80.3 (100 = expected for its age profile). This car fails its MOT about 20% less often than expected for its age. But this fleet is driven far less than average: matched on annual mileage as well as age, using 2019-2024 test chains rather than 2024 alone, the figure is 110.9, on the other side of normal. Both numbers below.

Age-adjusted peer: Honda CR-V (index 80.3) — the two published results are 0.0 index points apart.

Rover Mini common problems: what actually fails the MOT

Noise, emissions and leaks stand out at 17.3 per 100 tests, against 8.3 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.

Rover Mini MOT advisories: what gets flagged

Suspension is highest at 39.4 per 100 tests; Non-component advisories are lowest at 4.2 per 100 tests — the gap is 35.2 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.

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 4.5 percentage points. The failure most likely to come back is identification of the vehicle — 36.8% 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 64,019 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.

This is the rare case where usage changes the answer, not just the number: once you compare these against vehicles driven as little, the car moves from one side of normal to the other. Read the mileage-matched figure, not the headline one. 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 Rover Mini 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 Rover Mini perform as it gets older?

The Mini at age 20 is well below the reference at 25.7%, 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 Rover Mini MOT failures?

Major defects stand out at 112.8 per 100 tests, against 52.8 per 100 tests nationally.

higher bar = fails more oftenrate per 100 tests

Chart values: Minor 14.8 · Major 112.8 · Dangerous 10.6.

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

Does the month of a Rover Mini MOT matter?

Jan is highest at 38.2%; Aug is lowest at 30.7% — the gap is 7.5 percentage points.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Chart scale: 27%–40%.

bars: Rover Mini · dashed: all class-4 cars

Takeaway: the spread between best and worst month is 7.5 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.

Rover Mini average mileage by age

At age 20+, the middle half of Minis runs from 25,908 miles to 65,503 miles, against 46,126 miles as the median.

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

Does high mileage mean more Rover Mini 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+, 21.7% of those with under 40,000 miles failed first time versus 27% of those with 70,000–100,000 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 Mini has ~46,126 miles on the clock. Much more — ask why; much less — check for gaps in the MOT history.

Where in Britain the Rover Mini fails its MOT most

Bournemouth area is highest at 44.8%; Sunderland area is lowest at 14.4% — the gap is 30.4 percentage points.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Toughest areas	% failing	vs model overall
Bournemouth (BH)	44.8%	+11.8 pp
Salisbury (SP)	43.75%	+10.8 pp
Inverness (IV)	42.25%	+9.3 pp
Bath (BA)	41.67%	+8.7 pp
Lincoln (LN)	41.67%	+8.7 pp

Easiest areas	% failing	vs model overall
Sunderland (SR)	14.39%	-18.6 pp
Uxbridge (UB)	16.48%	-16.5 pp
Ilford (IG)	18.71%	-14.3 pp
Croydon (CR)	20.47%	-12.5 pp
Enfield (EN)	21.56%	-11.4 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 terrain gradient this model fails 7.9 pp more often than in the lowest fifth (r=0.52, n=21 areas with ≥800 tests).

In areas with the highest income deprivation this model fails 1.1 pp less often than in the lowest fifth (r=-0.25, n=36 areas with ≥800 tests).

In the most coastal fifth of areas this model fails 3.4 pp more often than in the most inland fifth (r=-0.20, n=36 areas with ≥800 tests).

Values shown in the quintile chart

Factor	Low Q	High Q	Gap	Correlation
Terrain gradient	30.5%	38.4%	+7.9 pp	r=0.52
Income deprivation	33.8%	32.8%	-1.0 pp	r=-0.25
Distance to coast	35.9%	32.5%	-3.4 pp	r=-0.20

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
Terrain gradient (% grade)	0.518	21	30.5	38.4	+7.9	0.5	3.2
Income deprivation (score)	-0.251	36	33.8	32.8	-1.1	0.1	0.1
Distance to coast (km)	-0.200	36	35.9	32.5	-3.4	6.1	90.5
Road-salt proxy (g/m²-yr)	-0.191	36	35.2	33.0	-2.2	206.3	414.9
Frost days (days/year)	-0.181	36	36.6	33.3	-3.3	10.1	24.3
MOT centre density (per 10k vehicles)	0.127	36	31.5	34.7	+3.2	5.5	7.5
Urban share (0–1)	0.021	36	33.9	35.1	+1.3	0.5	0.9

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: 23%–42% failing.

Rover Mini survival: which cars are still on the road

By age 19 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

Ages 4–6 average 65 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 Rover Mini likely to last?

Bought at age 5 stands out at 14.5 years.

bigger number = longer remaining lifeyears on the observed survival curve

estimateObserved only until age 19. 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.

Rover Mini faults that come together

Road Wheels + Tyres stand out at 7.74×, against 1.00× if the faults were independent.

above 1.0× = more than expectedbelow 1.0× = less

Defects in «Seat belts and supplementary restraint systems» and «Suspension» appear together 5.03× more often than chance (945 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).

Best year for a Rover Mini, and the years to avoid

Build year 1999 is highest at 100.2; Build year 2001 is lowest at 90.8 — the gap is 9.4 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 2001 and the weakest is 2001. 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 — 1 of 4 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.

Rover Mini MOT repair costs

The MOT-failure repair budget per test runs from £153.60 to £291.84, 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 £154 to £292, 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.

Rover Mini 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 Rover Mini 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 Rover Mini advisory become a failure?

Suspension is highest at 18.0%; Non-component advisories are lowest at 0.0% — 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 18 in 100 cars, and the median gap is 12.2 months and roughly 486 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 Rover Mini?

Lamps, reflectors and electrical equipment after a failure at age 20+ are highest at 19.8%; Suspension after a passed at age 15-19 is lowest at 6.3% — the gap is 13.5 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.

Rover Mini ownership: what six years of MOTs show

The ten-day re-test pass rate is highest at 68.6%; The later re-test pass rate is lowest at 11.1% — the gap is 57.5 percentage points.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Failing is usually a same-week event, not a disaster. Of 15,308 failures followed through to their re-test, 20.22% were repaired and passed the same day and 68.64% within ten days; the median gap is 3 days. 54,848 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 2.624 failures per 10,000 miles, on a median of 296 miles a year across 15,770 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. 47.24% of these cars strung together three or more tests with nothing recorded at all, while 22.69% 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: 4.369% of 16,092 chains show a reading lower than the previous test, with a median drop of 18,728 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.

Rover Mini 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 Rover Mini, covering roughly 5,809 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.

Rover Mini MOT: quick answers

Rover Mini MOT Risk Index is well below the reference at 80.3, 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 Rover Mini first-time MOT pass rate?

71.37% of first attempts passed in 2024 (10,968 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 28.63% figure is the first-time initial failure rate, using 10,968 primary tests as the denominator (first-time, excluding retests). The age-adjusted MOT initial-failure ratio 80.3 is shown separately because raw rates compare fleet age as well as cars.

Compare the Rover Mini with other cars

Honda CR-V is highest at 80.3; Suzuki Vitara is lowest at 79.9 — the gap is 0.4 points.

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

Same brand

All Rover MOT statistics

Similar risk

Honda CR-V (index 80.3)Toyota Prius (index 80.0)Suzuki Vitara (index 79.9)

Same size class

how BMW Z3 compareshow Ford Mustang compareshow BMW M4 compares

By build year

Rover Mini 1998Rover Mini 1999Rover Mini 2000Rover Mini 2001

By area

Rover Mini MOT failure rate by postcode area

By failure group

Rover Mini body, chassis and structure failuresRover Mini brakes failuresRover Mini vehicle identification failuresRover Mini lamps, reflectors and electrics failuresRover Mini noise, emissions and leaks failuresRover Mini road wheels failuresRover Mini seat belts and airbags failuresRover Mini steering failuresRover Mini suspension failuresRover Mini tyres failuresRover Mini visibility failures