Smart City-Coupe — MOT statistics 2024

The Smart City-Coupe failed 41.18% of 4,878 first MOT attempts in 2024 ("first-time", excluding retests). Adjusted for the age of the fleet, its initial-failure ratio is 98.6 (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. 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 107.1, on the other side of normal. Both numbers below.

Age-adjusted peer: Citroen C3 Aircross (index 98.6) — the two published results are 0.0 index points apart.

Smart City-Coupe common problems: what actually fails the MOT

Suspension is well below the reference at 21.4 per 100 tests, against 31.4 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.

Smart City-Coupe MOT advisories: what gets flagged

Brakes are highest at 48.0 per 100 tests; Body & structure are lowest at 5.4 per 100 tests — the gap is 42.6 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 2.7 percentage points. The failure most likely to come back is steering — 38.5% 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 41,420 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 Smart City-Coupe 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 Smart City-Coupe perform as it gets older?

The City-Coupe at age 16 is well below the reference at 34.3%, against 43.1% for all vehicles of the same age.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Chart axes: car age, years · failure-rate scale 0–48%.

Takeaway: solid line: this family; dashed: all cars.

How dangerous are Smart City-Coupe MOT failures?

Major defects stand out at 104.6 per 100 tests, against 52.8 per 100 tests nationally.

higher bar = fails more oftenrate per 100 tests

Chart values: Minor 17.1 · Major 104.6 · Dangerous 11.1.

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

Does the month of a Smart City-Coupe MOT matter?

Jan is highest at 44.3%; Dec is lowest at 39.8% — the gap is 4.5 percentage points.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Chart scale: 27%–46%.

bars: Smart City-Coupe · dashed: all class-4 cars

Takeaway: the spread between best and worst month is 4.5 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.

Smart City-Coupe average mileage by age

At age 17, the middle half of City-Coupes runs from 50,515 miles to 80,594 miles, against 63,212 miles as the median.

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

Chart axes: car age, years · odometer scale 0–90k mi.

Does high mileage mean more Smart City-Coupe 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+, 33.2% of those with under 40,000 miles failed first time versus 44.8% 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 17-year-old City-Coupe has ~63,212 miles on the clock. Much more — ask why; much less — check for gaps in the MOT history.

Where in Britain the Smart City-Coupe fails its MOT most

Salisbury area is highest at 57.9%; Luton area is lowest at 26.1% — the gap is 31.7 percentage points.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Toughest areas	% failing	vs model overall
Salisbury (SP)	57.85%	+16.0 pp
Bournemouth (BH)	52.75%	+10.9 pp
Brighton (BN)	51.92%	+10.0 pp
Truro (TR)	51.01%	+9.1 pp
Torquay (TQ)	50.9%	+9.0 pp

Easiest areas	% failing	vs model overall
Luton (LU)	26.14%	-15.8 pp
Uxbridge (UB)	27.65%	-14.3 pp
Wigan (WN)	31.19%	-10.7 pp
Slough (SL)	31.7%	-10.2 pp
Twickenham (TW)	32.48%	-9.4 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: 33%–51% failing.

How many miles does a Smart City-Coupe last?

100,000+ miles stands out at 10.2%.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Of 41,449 tests of this family with a usable odometer in 2024, 10.2% had reached 100k miles. This is a cross-section of cars still presenting for MOT, not a full birth cohort.

Smart City-Coupe faults that come together

Road Wheels + Tyres stand out at 5.08×, 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 4.44× more often than chance (935 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 Smart City-Coupe?

Cars driven under 5,000 miles a year is well below the reference at 36.3%, against 47.0% 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 36.3% vs 47.0% for 8–12k miles/year — 10.7 pp lower (n_low=4,059, n_normal=328). 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.

Which Smart City-Coupe engine is best?

petrol under 1.0 is highest at 100.1; diesel under 1.0 is lowest at 88.5 — the gap is 11.6 points.

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

No engine band clearly fails less or more for its age: the bands are within 5 index points of each other, or their 95% intervals overlap, so this page does not name a best or worst engine.

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 Smart City-Coupe, and the years to avoid

Build year 2007 is highest at 101.0; Build year 2008 is lowest at 78.2 — the gap is 22.8 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 2008 and the weakest is 2009. 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 — 3 of 11 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.

Smart City-Coupe MOT repair costs

The MOT-failure repair budget per test runs from £157.89 to £299.99, 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 £158 to £300, 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.

Smart City-Coupe running costs for a fleet

Vehicles failing at age 19 stand out at 42.0%, against 35.0% at age 15, 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.

Smart City-Coupe rust problems: where they corrode

Age-standardised corrosion susceptibility stands out at 1.81×, against 1.00× for the national age-standardised rate.

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

This Smart City-Coupe fails on corrosion far more often than average once age is held constant, and its owners live in areas that are gentler than most for the models we publish. Those two point in opposite directions, which is the informative case: it rusts more than average despite living in gentler places, so the cause is the car, not the postcode.

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 Smart City-Coupe advisory become a failure?

Lamps, reflectors and electrical equipment are highest at 32.2%; Non-component advisories are lowest at 0.0% — the gap is 32.2 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 32 in 100 cars, and the median gap is 12.1 months and roughly 2,116 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 Smart City-Coupe?

Lamps, reflectors and electrical equipment after a failure at age 15-19 are highest at 28.5%; Visibility after a passed at age 6-8 is lowest at 5.1% — the gap is 23.4 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.

Smart City-Coupe ownership: what six years of MOTs show

The ten-day re-test pass rate is highest at 66.9%; The later re-test pass rate is lowest at 5.8% — the gap is 61.1 percentage points.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Failing is usually a same-week event, not a disaster. Of 11,661 failures followed through to their re-test, 27.26% were repaired and passed the same day and 66.92% within ten days; the median gap is 1 day. 36,519 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 1.396 failures per 10,000 miles, on a median of 1,785 miles a year across 8,596 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. 27.18% of these cars strung together three or more tests with nothing recorded at all, while 37.55% 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: 4.504% of 8,637 chains show a reading lower than the previous test, with a median drop of 28,570 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.

Smart City-Coupe MOT: quick answers

Smart City-Coupe MOT Risk Index is close to the reference at 98.6, 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 Smart City-Coupe first-time MOT pass rate?

58.82% of first attempts passed in 2024 (4,878 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 41.18% figure is the first-time initial failure rate, using 4,878 primary tests as the denominator (first-time, excluding retests). The age-adjusted MOT initial-failure ratio 98.6 is shown separately because raw rates compare fleet age as well as cars.

Compare the Smart City-Coupe with other cars

Volkswagen Lupo is highest at 98.6; Smart City-Coupe is lowest at 98.6 — the gap is 0.0 points.

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

Same brand

All Smart MOT statisticsSmart Fortwo MOT statsSmart Forfour MOT stats

Similar risk

Citroen C3 Aircross (index 98.6)Jaguar X-Type (index 98.6)Volkswagen Lupo (index 98.6)

Same size class

how Aston Martin Vantage compareshow Infiniti Q30 compareshow Honda S2000 compares

By build year

Smart City-Coupe 2000Smart City-Coupe 2001Smart City-Coupe 2002Smart City-Coupe 2003Smart City-Coupe 2004Smart City-Coupe 2005Smart City-Coupe 2006Smart City-Coupe 2007Smart City-Coupe 2008Smart City-Coupe 2009Smart City-Coupe 2010

By area

Smart City-Coupe MOT failure rate by postcode area

By failure group

Smart City-Coupe body, chassis and structure failuresSmart City-Coupe brakes failuresSmart City-Coupe vehicle identification failuresSmart City-Coupe lamps, reflectors and electrics failuresSmart City-Coupe noise, emissions and leaks failuresSmart City-Coupe road wheels failuresSmart City-Coupe seat belts and airbags failuresSmart City-Coupe steering failuresSmart City-Coupe suspension failuresSmart City-Coupe tyres failuresSmart City-Coupe visibility failures