Subaru BRZ — MOT statistics 2024

The Subaru BRZ failed 14.19% of 909 first MOT attempts in 2024 ("first-time", excluding retests). Adjusted for the age of the fleet, its initial-failure ratio is 58.1 (100 = expected for its age profile). This car fails its MOT about 42% less often than expected for its age. Small sample — treat with care.

Age-adjusted peer: Volkswagen Phaeton (index 58.8) — the two published results are 0.7 index points apart.

Subaru BRZ common problems: what actually fails the MOT

Suspension is well below the reference at 1.7 per 100 tests, against 6.8 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.

Subaru BRZ MOT advisories: what gets flagged

Tyres are highest at 31.7 per 100 tests; Body & structure are lowest at 1.1 per 100 tests — the gap is 30.6 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 10.9 percentage points. 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 4,772 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 6.5 points — this fleet is driven less than the vehicles it is measured against, so the age-only view flatters 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 the Subaru BRZ 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 Subaru BRZ perform as it gets older?

The BRZ at age 11 is well below the reference at 12.9%, against 33.2% for all vehicles of the same age.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Chart axes: car age, years · failure-rate scale 0–39%.

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

How dangerous are Subaru BRZ MOT failures?

Major defects are well below the reference at 10.6 per 100 tests, against 52.8 per 100 tests nationally.

higher bar = fails more oftenrate per 100 tests

Chart values: Minor 6.0 · Major 10.6 · Dangerous 4.9.

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

Does the month of a Subaru BRZ MOT matter?

Apr is highest at 14.9%; Sep is lowest at 8.6% — the gap is 6.3 percentage points.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Chart scale: 7%–33%.

bars: Subaru BRZ · dashed: all class-4 cars

Takeaway: the spread between best and worst month is 6.3 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.

Subaru BRZ average mileage by age

At age 8, the middle half of BRZ models runs from 31,623 miles to 57,663 miles, against 41,978 miles as the median.

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

Chart axes: car age, years · odometer scale 0–86k mi.

Does high mileage mean more Subaru BRZ MOT failures at the same age?

Within the same age group, split by odometer (2024 MOTs), so this separates wear from age: at ages 6–9, 9.8% of those with under 40,000 miles failed first time versus 17.2% of those with 40,000–70,000 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 8-year-old BRZ has ~41,978 miles on the clock. Much more — ask why; much less — check for gaps in the MOT history.

Where in Britain the Subaru BRZ fails its MOT most

Too few tests in any single postcode area to name one, so this is the wider picture across 4,812 tests, 2019-2024.

Raw pass/fail rates, not age-adjusted: fleets differ by region. England is split north of Sheffield, between Sheffield and Oxford, and south of it.

Subaru BRZ survival: which cars are still on the road

By age 12 is well below the reference at 9.9%, against 100.0% at the ages 4–6 reference level.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Chart axes: car age, years · survival vs ages 4–6 · scale 0–105%.

By age 8, only about 79% as many cars of this family present for MOT as at ages 4–6 (reference n≈674); survivors still fail at 13.1% vs 7.7% at age 4. Older cars that still appear are a selected subset — weaker ones have already left.

How many years is a Subaru BRZ likely to last?

Bought at age 5 is highest at 3.3 years; Bought at age 8 is lowest at 0.5 years — the gap is 2.8 years.

bigger number = longer remaining lifeyears on the observed survival curve

estimateObserved only until age 8. 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.

Subaru BRZ faults that come together

Lamps & electrical + Tyres stand out at 4.59×, against 1.00× if the faults were independent.

above 1.0× = more than expectedbelow 1.0× = less

Defects in «Lamps, reflectors and electrical equipment» and «Tyres» appear together 4.59× more often than chance (22 co-occurrences in the same test; 55 pairs compared).

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 Subaru BRZ?

Cars driven under 5,000 miles a year is well below the reference at 7.9%, against 16.1% 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 7.9% vs 16.1% for 8–12k miles/year — 8.2 pp lower (n_low=1,246, n_normal=707). 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.

Subaru BRZ MOT repair costs

The MOT-failure repair budget per test runs from £20.87 to £39.65, 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 £21 to £40, 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.

Subaru BRZ running costs for a fleet

Vehicles failing at age 10 are well below the reference at 11.0%, against 13.0% at age 7, 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.

Subaru BRZ rust problems: where they corrode

Salt-belt exposure stands out at 77th percentile, against 50th percentile as the middle of published models.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

This Subaru BRZ has too few tests to judge for corrosion once age is held constant, and its owners live in areas that are saltier than most 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 Subaru BRZ advisory become a failure?

Tyres stand out at 8.0%.

higher = more likelypercentage is the observed transition probability

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 8 in 100 cars, and the median gap is 12.2 months and roughly 5,939 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 Subaru BRZ?

Tyres after a failure at age 9-11 are highest at 12.2%; Brakes after a passed at age 3-5 are lowest at 1.7% — the gap is 10.5 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.

Subaru BRZ ownership: what six years of MOTs show

Clean three-test streak is highest at 64.2%; Repeated the same advisory is lowest at 11.3% — the gap is 52.9 percentage points.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Per mile driven, not per year. Dividing failures by the miles that actually went onto the odometers between consecutive tests gives 0.217 failures per 10,000 miles, on a median of 4,537 miles a year across 928 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. 64.22% of these cars strung together three or more tests with nothing recorded at all, while 11.29% 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: 1.185% of 928 chains show a reading lower than the previous test, with a median drop of 11,656 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.

Subaru BRZ safety recalls and how to check yours

DVSA recall campaigns stand out at 3.

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

recall campaigns launched per year

DVSA lists 3 safety recall campaigns for the Subaru BRZ, covering roughly 1,349 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.

Subaru BRZ technical service bulletins: what dealers are told

US market, Subaru BRZ, model years 2015–2022 only. A count of bulletins, not a UK failure rate.

NHTSA manufacturer communications are 518.

bigger number = more recorded dealer communicationsnot affected vehicles or confirmed faults

These are the issues the manufacturer fixes quietly: service communications sent to dealers without a public recall campaign. They show what the service network has been told even when the issue never became news.

United States · NHTSA manufacturer communications

Caveat worth stating plainly: this is NHTSA data about US-specification cars. British cars sold under the same name often use different gearboxes, engines and equipment, so a bulletin may describe a component that was never fitted here. The file counts dealer communications, not affected vehicles or confirmed failures, and it cannot tell you whether an individual UK car has the issue. A communication can carry more than one subject tag, so topic counts do not have to add up to the total. Source: NHTSA Manufacturer Communications API (US-market vehicles; queried model years 2015-2022). Licence: U.S. Government work / public domain · retrieved 2026-09-25.

Subaru BRZ owner complaints: what goes wrong

US market, Subaru BRZ, model years 2015–2022 only. A count of owner complaints, not a UK failure rate; NHTSA has no UK denominator.

Engine (not MOT-tested) is highest at 11; Suspension is lowest at 2 — the gap is 9.

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

Two different populations answering two different questions: the MOT records what an inspector can measure once a year, the complaint file records what annoyed or frightened an owner on the road. A component high in one column and absent from the other is the interesting case — driver-assistance and electronics dominate complaints while almost never appearing as an MOT failure item.

US owners have filed 27 complaints about the equivalent Subaru BRZ to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, including 2 that mention a crash, 1 a fire and 0 an injury. These are owner reports, not verified findings — but they are the only large public record of what drivers themselves notice, and they cover the years between MOT tests.

Caveat worth stating plainly: US-specification cars, self-selected reporters, no denominator — complaint counts scale with how many cars were sold there and how motivated owners are to file. The mechanical gap matters as much as the statistical one: American cars of the same name often carry different gearboxes, engines and equipment — automatics where Britain buys manuals — so a drivetrain complaint filed in Ohio may describe a part that was never fitted here. Read the ranking inside a model, not between models, and treat drivetrain entries with particular caution. Source: NHTSA ODI consumer complaints (US market, public domain) — US-spec vehicles, indicative only.

Subaru BRZ MOT: quick answers

Subaru BRZ MOT Risk Index is well below the reference at 58.1, 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 Subaru BRZ first-time MOT pass rate?

85.81% of first attempts passed in 2024 (909 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 14.19% figure is the first-time initial failure rate, using 909 primary tests as the denominator (first-time, excluding retests). The age-adjusted MOT initial-failure ratio 58.1 is shown separately because raw rates compare fleet age as well as cars.

Compare the Subaru BRZ with other cars

Jaguar I-Pace is highest at 59.1; Porsche Cayenne is lowest at 57.3 — the gap is 1.8 points.

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

Same brand

All Subaru MOT statisticsSubaru Impreza MOT statsSubaru WRX MOT stats

Similar risk

Volkswagen Phaeton (index 58.8)Porsche Cayenne (index 57.3)Jaguar I-Pace (index 59.1)

Same size class

how Daihatsu Hijet compareshow Skoda Felicia compareshow Bentley Mulsanne compares

By area

Subaru BRZ MOT failure rate by postcode area

By failure group

Subaru BRZ brakes failuresSubaru BRZ lamps, reflectors and electrics failuresSubaru BRZ noise, emissions and leaks failuresSubaru BRZ suspension failuresSubaru BRZ tyres failuresSubaru BRZ visibility failures