Saab 9-3 — MOT statistics 2024

The Saab 9-3 failed 36.75% of 37,861 first MOT attempts in 2024 ("first-time", excluding retests). Adjusted for the age of the fleet, its initial-failure ratio is 87.5 (100 = expected for its age profile). This car fails its MOT about 12% less often than expected for its age.

Age-adjusted peer: Audi A4 (index 87.4) — the two published results are 0.1 index points apart.

Saab 9-3 common problems: what actually fails the MOT

Lamps, reflectors and electrical equipment are well below the reference at 25.2 per 100 tests, against 32.9 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.

Saab 9-3 MOT advisories: what gets flagged

Brakes are highest at 42.6 per 100 tests; Non-component advisories are lowest at 7.5 per 100 tests — the gap is 35.1 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.

Tyres, brakes and suspension: Saab 9-3 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.

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 4.0 percentage points. The failure most likely to come back is lamps, reflectors and electrical equipment — 33.5% 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 333,043 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 changes little here (-3.3 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 Saab 9-3 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 Saab 9-3 perform as it gets older?

The 9-3 at age 12 is well below the reference at 25.6%, against 35.7% 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 Saab 9-3 MOT failures?

Major defects stand out at 79.8 per 100 tests, against 52.8 per 100 tests nationally.

higher bar = fails more oftenrate per 100 tests

Chart values: Minor 21.7 · Major 79.8 · Dangerous 15.0.

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

Does the month of a Saab 9-3 MOT matter?

Apr is highest at 40.5%; Sep is lowest at 38.4% — the gap is 2.1 percentage points.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Chart scale: 27%–42%.

bars: Saab 9-3 · dashed: all class-4 cars

Takeaway: the spread between best and worst month is 2.1 percentage points — booking month barely matters for this family. 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.

Saab 9-3 average mileage by age

At age 16, the middle half of 9-3s runs from 93,019 miles to 148,536 miles, against 120,102 miles as the median.

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

Chart axes: car age, years · odometer scale 0–156k mi.

Does high mileage mean more Saab 9-3 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+, 19.5% of those with under 40,000 miles failed first time versus 43.6% of those with over 140,000 miles.Inside this age group, higher mileage goes with more failures.

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

A typical 16-year-old 9-3 has ~120,102 miles on the clock. Much more — ask why; much less — check for gaps in the MOT history.

Where in Britain the Saab 9-3 fails its MOT most

Dundee area is highest at 54.3%; Croydon area is lowest at 28.4% — the gap is 25.9 percentage points.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Toughest areas	% failing	vs model overall
Dundee (DD)	54.29%	+15.1 pp
Kirkcaldy (KY)	51.8%	+12.6 pp
Paisley (PA)	49.93%	+10.7 pp
Aberdeen (AB)	49.88%	+10.7 pp
Plymouth (PL)	49.51%	+10.3 pp

Easiest areas	% failing	vs model overall
Croydon (CR)	28.38%	-10.8 pp
Sheffield (S)	28.41%	-10.8 pp
London SE (SE)	28.63%	-10.6 pp
St Albans (AL)	28.85%	-10.4 pp
Uxbridge (UB)	29.38%	-9.8 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 11.9 pp more often than in the lowest fifth (r=0.70, n=110 areas with ≥800 tests).

In areas with the highest urban share this model fails 10.5 pp less often than in the lowest fifth (r=-0.57, n=110 areas with ≥800 tests).

In areas with the highest frost days this model fails 6.0 pp more often than in the lowest fifth (r=0.43, n=110 areas with ≥800 tests).

Values shown in the quintile chart

Factor	Low Q	High Q	Gap	Correlation
MOT centre density	32.7%	44.6%	+11.9 pp	r=0.70
Urban share	43.3%	32.8%	-10.5 pp	r=-0.57
Frost days	37.3%	43.3%	+6.0 pp	r=0.43

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)	0.700	110	32.7	44.6	+11.9	5	8.5
Urban share (0–1)	-0.573	110	43.3	32.8	-10.5	0.4	1
Frost days (days/year)	0.426	110	37.3	43.3	+6.0	11.6	37.7
Road-salt proxy (g/m²-yr)	0.414	110	35.5	43.1	+7.7	221.2	665.9
Distance to coast (km)	-0.353	110	43.8	37.6	-6.2	6.2	78.9
Terrain gradient (% grade)	0.203	65	40.4	42.5	+2.1	0.5	3.4
Income deprivation (score)	-0.010	94	37.5	37.6	+0.1	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: 30%–48% failing.

How many miles does a Saab 9-3 last?

100,000+ miles is highest at 59.4%; 200,000+ miles is lowest at 2.4% — the gap is 57.1 percentage points.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Of 333,876 tests of this family with a usable odometer in 2024, 59.4% had reached 100k miles, 16.7% had reached 150k miles, 2.4% had reached 200k miles. This is a cross-section of cars still presenting for MOT, not a full birth cohort.

Saab 9-3 faults that come together

Body & structure + Emissions & leaks stand out at 4.19×, against 1.00× 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 4.19× more often than chance (5,928 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).

Is low mileage better for a Saab 9-3?

Cars driven under 5,000 miles a year is well below the reference at 25.8%, against 41.1% 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 25.8% vs 41.1% for 8–12k miles/year — 15.4 pp lower (n_low=18,531, n_normal=69,582). 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. Diesel alone: 25.4% low-use vs 41.1% normal (-15.7 pp).

Which Saab 9-3 engine is best?

diesel over 2.0 is highest at 114.9; petrol over 2.0 is lowest at 82.4 — the gap is 32.5 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 1.8–2.0 runs at 103.5 against this model's own age norm while the petrol over 2.0 runs at 82.4 — a spread of 21.1 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.

Best year for a Saab 9-3, and the years to avoid

Build year 2004 is highest at 105.3; Build year 2012 is lowest at 78.6 — the gap is 26.7 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 2010 and the weakest is 2004. 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 — 10 of 15 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.

Saab 9-3 MOT repair costs

The MOT-failure repair budget per test runs from £124.41 to £236.38, 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 £124 to £236, 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.

Saab 9-3 running costs for a fleet

Vehicles failing at age 19 stand out at 39.0%, against 26.0% at age 12, 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.

Saab 9-3 rust problems: where they corrode

Age-standardised corrosion susceptibility stands out at 2.27×, against 1.00× for the national age-standardised rate.

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

This Saab 9-3 fails on corrosion far more often than average 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 Saab 9-3 advisory become a failure?

Lamps, reflectors and electrical equipment are highest at 26.4%; Road wheels are lowest at 0.9% — the gap is 25.5 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 26 in 100 cars, and the median gap is 12.1 months and roughly 4,468 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 Saab 9-3?

Lamps, reflectors and electrical equipment after a failure at age 15-19 are highest at 25.3%; Lamps, reflectors and electrical equipment after a passed at age 6-8 are lowest at 5.0% — the gap is 20.3 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.

Saab 9-3 ownership: what six years of MOTs show

The ten-day re-test pass rate is highest at 60.0%; The later re-test pass rate is lowest at 4.6% — the gap is 55.4 percentage points.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Failing is usually a same-week event, not a disaster. Of 97,490 failures followed through to their re-test, 35.36% were repaired and passed the same day and 60.03% within ten days; the median gap is 1 day. 261,432 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 0.721 failures per 10,000 miles, on a median of 4,117 miles a year across 68,123 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. 24.18% of these cars strung together three or more tests with nothing recorded at all, while 40.55% 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: 0.789% of 68,207 chains show a reading lower than the previous test, with a median drop of 10,043 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.

Saab 9-3 safety recalls and how to check yours

DVSA recall campaigns stand out at 7.

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

recall campaigns launched per year

DVSA lists 7 safety recall campaigns for the Saab 9-3, covering roughly 39,476 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.

Saab 9-3 inspection results in other countries

United Kingdom MOT stands out at 36.8%, against 26.0% nationally.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

The verdict is consistent across every regime where the difference is clear, which is the strongest form this comparison takes: independent inspectorates, different rulebooks, same direction of travel.

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 1.49 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 Saab 9-3 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 87.5 — 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.; Traficom — Periodic inspections of cars by model / by model and fault object 2024, CC BY 4.0; Statens vegvesen — Periodisk kjøretøykontroll (PKK) 2024, CC BY 4.0. Adapted; licences and full notice.

Saab 9-3 MOT: quick answers

Saab 9-3 MOT Risk Index is well below the reference at 87.5, 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 Saab 9-3 first-time MOT pass rate?

63.25% of first attempts passed in 2024 (37,861 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 36.75% figure is the first-time initial failure rate, using 37,861 primary tests as the denominator (first-time, excluding retests). The age-adjusted MOT initial-failure ratio 87.5 is shown separately because raw rates compare fleet age as well as cars.

Compare the Saab 9-3 with other cars

Smart Fortwo is highest at 87.6; Audi A4 is lowest at 87.4 — the gap is 0.2 points.

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

Same brand

All Saab MOT statistics

Similar risk

Audi A4 (index 87.4)Mercedes-Benz C-Class (index 87.4)Smart Fortwo (index 87.6)

Same size class

how Volkswagen Touareg compareshow Skoda Kodiaq compareshow Vauxhall Viva compares

By build year

Saab 9-3 1998Saab 9-3 1999Saab 9-3 2000Saab 9-3 2001Saab 9-3 2002Saab 9-3 2003Saab 9-3 2004Saab 9-3 2005Saab 9-3 2006Saab 9-3 2007Saab 9-3 2008Saab 9-3 2009Saab 9-3 2010Saab 9-3 2011Saab 9-3 2012

By area

Saab 9-3 MOT failure rate by postcode area

By failure group

Saab 9-3 body, chassis and structure failuresSaab 9-3 brakes failuresSaab 9-3 vehicle identification failuresSaab 9-3 lamps, reflectors and electrics failuresSaab 9-3 noise, emissions and leaks failuresSaab 9-3 road wheels failuresSaab 9-3 seat belts and airbags failuresSaab 9-3 steering failuresSaab 9-3 suspension failuresSaab 9-3 tyres failuresSaab 9-3 visibility failures

Inspections abroad

Saab 9-3 in NorwaySaab 9-3 in FinlandSaab 9-3 in the Netherlands