Volvo 400 Series — MOT statistics 2024

The Volvo 400 Series failed 40.62% of 384 first MOT attempts in 2024 ("first-time", excluding retests). Adjusted for the age of the fleet, its initial-failure ratio is 118.9 (100 = expected for its age profile). This car fails its MOT about 19% more often than expected for its age. Small sample — treat with care.

Age-adjusted peer: Renault Grand Modus (index 118.9) — the two published results are 0.0 index points apart.

Volvo 400 Series common problems: what actually fails the MOT

Brakes stand out at 44.6 per 100 tests, against 20.3 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.

Volvo 400 Series MOT advisories: what gets flagged

Suspension is highest at 63.8 per 100 tests; Identification is lowest at 8.1 per 100 tests — the gap is 55.7 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 (34.4% against 35.6%): the difference is within the margin of error. The failure most likely to come back is lamps, reflectors and electrical equipment — 29.5% 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 1,564 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.

Mileage matters here: matching on how much these are driven moves the figure by 4.9 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 does the Volvo 400 Series perform as it gets older?

Chart axes: car age, years · failure-rate scale 0–47%.

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

How dangerous are Volvo 400 Series MOT failures?

Major defects stand out at 135.2 per 100 tests, against 52.8 per 100 tests nationally.

higher bar = fails more oftenrate per 100 tests

Chart values: Minor 31.8 · Major 135.2 · Dangerous 12.7.

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

Does the month of a Volvo 400 Series MOT matter?

Feb is highest at 45.8%; Dec is lowest at 39.0% — the gap is 6.8 percentage points.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Chart scale: 27%–47%.

bars: Volvo 400 Series · 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.

Volvo 400 Series average mileage by age

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

Where in Britain the Volvo 400 Series fails its MOT most

Too few tests in any single postcode area to name one, so this is the wider picture across 1,941 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.

Volvo 400 Series faults that come together

Seatbelts & SRS + Suspension stand out at 3.73×, 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 3.73× more often than chance (37 co-occurrences in the same test; 66 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).

Which Volvo 400 Series engine is best?

petrol 1.8–2.0 is highest at 106.3; petrol 1.5–1.8 is lowest at 97.6 — the gap is 8.7 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.

Volvo 400 Series MOT repair costs

The MOT-failure repair budget per test runs from £203.30 to £386.27, 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 £203 to £386, 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.

Volvo 400 Series rust problems: where they corrode

Salt-belt exposure is close to the reference at 51st percentile, against 50th percentile as the middle of published models.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

This Volvo 400 Series has too few tests to judge for 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.

What will fail next on a Volvo 400 Series?

Lamps, reflectors and electrical equipment after a failure at age 20+ are highest at 27.9%; Suspension after a passed at age 20+ is lowest at 9.7% — the gap is 18.2 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.

Volvo 400 Series ownership: what six years of MOTs show

Odometer anomalies stand out at 2.8%.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Odometer anomalies: 2.752% of 545 chains show a reading lower than the previous test, with a median drop of 5,762 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.

Volvo 400 Series safety recalls and how to check yours

DVSA recall campaigns stand out at 2.

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

recall campaigns launched per year

DVSA lists 2 safety recall campaigns for the Volvo 400 Series, covering roughly 95,736 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.

Volvo 400 Series MOT: quick answers

Volvo 400 Series MOT Risk Index stands out at 118.9, 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 Volvo 400 Series first-time MOT pass rate?

59.38% of first attempts passed in 2024 (384 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 40.62% figure is the first-time initial failure rate, using 384 primary tests as the denominator (first-time, excluding retests). The age-adjusted MOT initial-failure ratio 118.9 is shown separately because raw rates compare fleet age as well as cars.

Compare the Volvo 400 Series with other cars

Renault Grand Modus is highest at 118.9; Citroen C4 Picasso is lowest at 118.7 — the gap is 0.2 points.

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

Same brand

All Volvo MOT statisticsVolvo V50 MOT statsVolvo 800 Series MOT stats

Similar risk

Renault Grand Modus (index 118.9)Citroen C3 (index 118.8)Citroen C4 Picasso (index 118.7)

Same size class

how Rover 416 compareshow Honda NSX compareshow Ferrari 599 compares

By failure group

Volvo 400 Series body, chassis and structure failuresVolvo 400 Series brakes failuresVolvo 400 Series lamps, reflectors and electrics failuresVolvo 400 Series noise, emissions and leaks failuresVolvo 400 Series seat belts and airbags failuresVolvo 400 Series steering failuresVolvo 400 Series suspension failuresVolvo 400 Series tyres failuresVolvo 400 Series visibility failures