Saab 900 — MOT statistics 2024

The Saab 900 failed 35.01% of 2,305 first MOT attempts in 2024 ("first-time", excluding retests). Adjusted for the age of the fleet, its initial-failure ratio is 101.6 (100 = expected for its age profile). This car is too close to call — statistically indistinguishable from normal for its age. Small sample — treat with care.

Age-adjusted peer: Kia XCeed (index 101.8) — the two published results are 0.2 index points apart.

Saab 900 common problems: what actually fails the MOT

Brakes stand out at 26.1 per 100 tests, against 21.0 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 900 MOT advisories: what gets flagged

Brakes are highest at 43.3 per 100 tests; Steering is lowest at 6.7 per 100 tests — the gap is 36.6 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 does not clearly change next year's odds here (33.2% against 31.0%): the difference is within the margin of error. The failure most likely to come back is steering — 27.3% 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 15,554 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 matters here: matching on how much these are driven moves the figure by 10.0 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 Saab 900 perform as it gets older?

The 900 at age 20 is well below the reference at 31.1%, 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 Saab 900 MOT failures?

Major defects stand out at 109.3 per 100 tests, against 52.8 per 100 tests nationally.

higher bar = fails more oftenrate per 100 tests

Chart values: Minor 24.9 · Major 109.3 · Dangerous 11.4.

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

Does the month of a Saab 900 MOT matter?

Feb is highest at 42.1%; Aug is lowest at 35.3% — the gap is 6.8 percentage points.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Chart scale: 27%–44%.

bars: Saab 900 · dashed: all class-4 cars

Takeaway: the spread between best and worst month is 6.8 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.

Saab 900 average mileage by age

At age 20+, the middle half of 900s runs from 87,644 miles to 137,547 miles, against 113,144 miles as the median.

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

Does high mileage mean more Saab 900 MOT failures?

All ages together, split by odometer (the bands are not split by age, so higher-mileage cars are also older and this mixes wear with age): 28.6% of the lowest-mileage cars failed versus 42.9% of the highest.

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

A typical 20+-year-old 900 has ~113,144 miles on the clock. Much more — ask why; much less — check for gaps in the MOT history.

Where in Britain the Saab 900 fails its MOT most

Stoke-on-Trent area is highest at 55.1%; Hemel Hempstead area is lowest at 22.5% — the gap is 32.6 percentage points.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Toughest areas	% failing	vs model overall
Stoke-on-Trent (ST)	55.05%	+16.2 pp
Edinburgh (EH)	52.86%	+14.0 pp
Exeter (EX)	52.7%	+13.9 pp
Kirkcaldy (KY)	52.03%	+13.2 pp
Swindon (SN)	51.38%	+12.6 pp

Easiest areas	% failing	vs model overall
Hemel Hempstead (HP)	22.47%	-16.4 pp
Slough (SL)	25.76%	-13.1 pp
St Albans (AL)	25.83%	-13.0 pp
Chester (CH)	26.02%	-12.8 pp
London SE (SE)	26.93%	-11.9 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: 29%–53% failing.

How many miles does a Saab 900 last?

100,000+ miles is highest at 69.9%; 200,000+ miles is lowest at 8.5% — the gap is 61.3 percentage points.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Of 17,689 tests of this family with a usable odometer in 2024, 69.9% had reached 100k miles, 31.1% had reached 150k miles, 8.5% had reached 200k miles. This is a cross-section of cars still presenting for MOT, not a full birth cohort.

Saab 900 faults that come together

Seatbelts & SRS + Suspension stand out at 4.33×, 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 3.25× more often than chance (557 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 Saab 900 engine is best?

petrol over 2.0 is highest at 108.8; petrol 1.8–2.0 is lowest at 99.3 — the gap is 9.5 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 petrol over 2.0 runs at 108.8 against this model's own age norm while the petrol 1.8–2.0 runs at 99.3 — a spread of 9.5 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.

Saab 900 MOT repair costs

The MOT-failure repair budget per test runs from £147.33 to £279.93, 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 £147 to £280, 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 900 rust problems: where they corrode

Age-standardised corrosion susceptibility is well below the reference at 0.82×, against 1.00× for the national age-standardised rate.

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

This Saab 900 fails on corrosion at about the average rate 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 900 advisory become a failure?

Body, chassis, structure are highest at 19.3%; Identification of the vehicle is lowest at 2.9% — the gap is 16.4 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 19 in 100 cars, and the median gap is 12.1 months and roughly 1,224 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 900?

Lamps, reflectors and electrical equipment after a failure at age 20+ are highest at 24.1%; Noise, emissions and leaks after a failure at age unknown are lowest at 7.4% — the gap is 16.6 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 900 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 10.0% — the gap is 58.6 percentage points.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Failing is usually a same-week event, not a disaster. Of 4,376 failures followed through to their re-test, 21.41% were repaired and passed the same day and 68.58% within ten days; the median gap is 2 days. 13,807 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 1.832 failures per 10,000 miles, on a median of 956 miles a year across 3,733 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. 29.05% of these cars strung together three or more tests with nothing recorded at all, while 39.49% 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: 1.861% of 3,762 chains show a reading lower than the previous test, with a median drop of 32,038 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 900 safety recalls and how to check yours

DVSA recall campaigns stand out at 11.

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

recall campaigns launched per year

DVSA lists 11 safety recall campaigns for the Saab 900, covering roughly 41,730 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 900 inspection results in other countries

Netherlands APK stands out at 67.6%, against 50.8% 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.

Worth dwelling on how mundane the top of that list is: tyre pressure, tread depth, headlight aim. The Dutch APK records 1.935 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 900 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: RDW open data — Meldingen Keuringsinstantie + Geconstateerde Gebreken + Gekentekende voertuigen (2024), CC0. Not an RDW endorsement.. Adapted; licences and full notice.

Saab 900 MOT: quick answers

Saab 900 MOT Risk Index is close to the reference at 101.6, 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 Saab 900 first-time MOT pass rate?

64.99% of first attempts passed in 2024 (2,305 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 35.01% figure is the first-time initial failure rate, using 2,305 primary tests as the denominator (first-time, excluding retests). The age-adjusted MOT initial-failure ratio 101.6 is shown separately because raw rates compare fleet age as well as cars.

Compare the Saab 900 with other cars

Kia XCeed is highest at 101.8; Hyundai Amica is lowest at 101.2 — the gap is 0.6 points.

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

Same brand

All Saab MOT statisticsSaab 9-3 MOT statsSaab 9-5 MOT stats

Similar risk

Kia XCeed (index 101.8)Peugeot RCZ (index 101.3)Hyundai Amica (index 101.2)

Same size class

how Porsche 944 compareshow Toyota Vellfire compareshow TVR Chimaera compares

By area

Saab 900 MOT failure rate by postcode area

By failure group

Saab 900 body, chassis and structure failuresSaab 900 brakes failuresSaab 900 vehicle identification failuresSaab 900 lamps, reflectors and electrics failuresSaab 900 noise, emissions and leaks failuresSaab 900 seat belts and airbags failuresSaab 900 steering failuresSaab 900 suspension failuresSaab 900 tyres failuresSaab 900 visibility failures

Inspections abroad

Saab 900 in the Netherlands