Volvo C30 — MOT statistics 2024

The Volvo C30 failed 41.41% of 22,664 first MOT attempts in 2024 ("first-time", excluding retests). Adjusted for the age of the fleet, its initial-failure ratio is 103.4 (100 = expected for its age profile). This car fails its MOT about 3% more often than expected for its age.

Age-adjusted peer: Nissan Leaf (index 103.4) — the two published results are 0.0 index points apart.

Volvo C30 common problems: what actually fails the MOT

Lamps, reflectors and electrical equipment stand out at 33.4 per 100 tests, against 24.4 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.

Volvo C30 MOT advisories: what gets flagged

Tyres are highest at 47.4 per 100 tests; Emissions & leaks are lowest at 5.1 per 100 tests — the gap is 42.3 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: Volvo C30 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 4.6 percentage points. The failure most likely to come back is lamps, reflectors and electrical equipment — 39.4% 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 154,339 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 (-1.4 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 Volvo C30 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 Volvo C30 perform as it gets older?

The C30 at age 18 is well below the reference at 39.3%, against 43.9% for all vehicles of the same age.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Chart axes: car age, years · failure-rate scale 0–49%.

Takeaway: solid line: this family; dashed: all cars; from about age 12 it stays above the national age curve.

How dangerous are Volvo C30 MOT failures?

Major defects stand out at 67.7 per 100 tests, against 52.8 per 100 tests nationally.

higher bar = fails more oftenrate per 100 tests

Chart values: Minor 22.5 · Major 67.7 · Dangerous 16.7.

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 C30 MOT matter?

Jul is highest at 40.1%; Mar is lowest at 37.9% — the gap is 2.1 percentage points.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Chart scale: 27%–42%.

bars: Volvo C30 · 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.

Volvo C30 average mileage by age

At age 15, the middle half of C30s runs from 77,845 miles to 129,444 miles, against 103,521 miles as the median.

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

Chart axes: car age, years · odometer scale 0–141k mi.

Does high mileage mean more Volvo C30 MOT failures at the same age?

Within the same age group, split by odometer (2024 MOTs), so this separates wear from age: at ages 10–14, 20.5% of those with under 40,000 miles failed first time versus 47.1% 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 15-year-old C30 has ~103,521 miles on the clock. Much more — ask why; much less — check for gaps in the MOT history.

Where in Britain the Volvo C30 fails its MOT most

Kirkcaldy area is highest at 54.0%; Ilford area is lowest at 23.7% — the gap is 30.3 percentage points.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Toughest areas	% failing	vs model overall
Kirkcaldy (KY)	54.01%	+14.9 pp
Dundee (DD)	51.35%	+12.2 pp
Aberdeen (AB)	50.18%	+11.1 pp
Bristol (BS)	50.02%	+10.9 pp
Paisley (PA)	49.02%	+9.9 pp

Easiest areas	% failing	vs model overall
Ilford (IG)	23.68%	-15.4 pp
Uxbridge (UB)	25.36%	-13.8 pp
Romford (RM)	25.92%	-13.2 pp
Sutton (SM)	26.04%	-13.1 pp
Enfield (EN)	26.51%	-12.6 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 6.7 pp more often than in the lowest fifth (r=0.56, n=77 areas with ≥800 tests).

In the most coastal fifth of areas this model fails 3.5 pp more often than in the most inland fifth (r=-0.35, n=77 areas with ≥800 tests).

In areas with the highest road-salt proxy this model fails 3.7 pp more often than in the lowest fifth (r=0.34, n=77 areas with ≥800 tests).

Values shown in the quintile chart

Factor	Low Q	High Q	Gap	Correlation
MOT centre density	36.1%	42.8%	+6.7 pp	r=0.56
Distance to coast	41.3%	37.8%	-3.5 pp	r=-0.35
Road-salt proxy	38.6%	42.3%	+3.7 pp	r=0.34

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)	0.561	77	36.1	42.8	+6.7	5.7	8.4
Distance to coast (km)	-0.352	77	41.3	37.8	-3.5	6.2	84
Road-salt proxy (g/m²-yr)	0.336	77	38.6	42.3	+3.7	233.9	623.6
Frost days (days/year)	0.333	77	38.7	42.2	+3.4	11.9	35.3
Urban share (0–1)	-0.329	77	41.3	36.9	-4.3	0.4	0.9
Terrain gradient (% grade)	0.200	46	39.1	42.9	+3.7	0.5	3.6
Income deprivation (score)	0.077	67	36.6	38.6	+2.0	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: 28%–47% failing.

Volvo C30 survival: which cars are still on the road

By age 18 is well below the reference at 11.3%, 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 17, at least as many cars of this family present for MOT as at ages 4–6 (reference n≈1,057): the older fleet has not thinned out here, so there is no survivor selection to allow for.

How many miles does a Volvo C30 last?

100,000+ miles is highest at 38.4%; 200,000+ miles is lowest at 0.5% — the gap is 37.9 percentage points.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Of 154,413 tests of this family with a usable odometer in 2024, 38.4% had reached 100k miles, 6.0% had reached 150k miles, 0.5% had reached 200k miles. This is a cross-section of cars still presenting for MOT, not a full birth cohort.

How many years is a Volvo C30 likely to last?

Bought at age 8 is highest at 9.5 years; Bought at age 15 is lowest at 2.5 years — the gap is 7.0 years.

bigger number = longer remaining lifeyears on the observed survival curve

estimateEstimate only — not a warranty: a typical 10-year-old example of this family has at least 7.5 expected years of further MOT-present life. The curve is observed only until age 17, so the true figure is likely higher.

Volvo C30 faults that come together

Identification + Road Wheels stand out at 9.23×, 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 3.55× more often than chance (1,204 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 Volvo C30?

Cars driven under 5,000 miles a year is well below the reference at 25.9%, against 43.6% 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 25.9% vs 43.6% for 8–12k miles/year — 17.8 pp lower (n_low=21,891, n_normal=50,054). 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: 26.2% low-use vs 43.4% normal (-17.2 pp).

Which Volvo C30 engine is best?

diesel 1.5–1.8 is highest at 103.8; petrol over 2.0 is lowest at 83.2 — the gap is 20.6 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 1.5–1.8 runs at 103.8 against this model's own age norm while the petrol over 2.0 runs at 83.2 — a spread of 20.6 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 Volvo C30, and the years to avoid

Build year 2008 is highest at 105.3; Build year 2013 is lowest at 91.9 — the gap is 13.4 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 2013 and the weakest is 2008. 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 — 4 of 8 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.

Volvo C30 MOT repair costs

The MOT-failure repair budget per test runs from £115.61 to £219.66, 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 £116 to £220, 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 C30 running costs for a fleet

Vehicles failing at age 18 stand out at 39.0%, against 33.0% at age 11, tested in the same year.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

The number a fleet manager needs is not the failure rate, it is the year the car starts costing more. Between cars aged 12 and cars aged 13, both tested in 2024, the failure rate of this model is 4.35 percentage points higher — the steepest one-year step in this cross-section of different cars, and a natural planning point for replacement.

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.

Volvo C30 rust problems: where they corrode

Age-standardised corrosion susceptibility is well below the reference at 0.84×, against 1.00× for the national age-standardised rate.

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

This Volvo C30 fails on corrosion at about the average rate 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 Volvo C30 advisory become a failure?

Lamps, reflectors and electrical equipment are highest at 29.8%; Non-component advisories are lowest at 0.0% — the gap is 29.8 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 30 in 100 cars, and the median gap is 12 months and roughly 5,960 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 Volvo C30?

Lamps, reflectors and electrical equipment after a failure at age 15-19 are highest at 32.5%; Tyres after a passed at age 3-5 are lowest at 5.3% — the gap is 27.2 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 C30 ownership: what six years of MOTs show

The ten-day re-test pass rate is highest at 55.9%; The later re-test pass rate is lowest at 3.0% — the gap is 52.9 percentage points.

higher = larger sharecompare shares in percentage points

Failing is usually a same-week event, not a disaster. Of 45,618 failures followed through to their re-test, 41.17% were repaired and passed the same day and 55.85% within ten days; the median gap is 1 day. 121,097 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 0.644 failures per 10,000 miles, on a median of 5,103 miles a year across 27,727 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. 28.98% of these cars strung together three or more tests with nothing recorded at all, while 40.38% 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: 0.786% of 27,734 chains show a reading lower than the previous test, with a median drop of 11,002 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 C30 safety recalls and how to check yours

DVSA recall campaigns stand out at 18.

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

recall campaigns launched per year

DVSA lists 18 safety recall campaigns for the Volvo C30, covering roughly 160,739 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 C30 inspection results in other countries

United Kingdom MOT stands out at 41.4%, 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 1.294 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 Volvo C30 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.; 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.

Volvo C30 MOT: quick answers

Volvo C30 MOT Risk Index is close to the reference at 103.4, 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 C30 first-time MOT pass rate?

58.59% of first attempts passed in 2024 (22,664 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 41.41% figure is the first-time initial failure rate, using 22,664 primary tests as the denominator (first-time, excluding retests). The age-adjusted MOT initial-failure ratio 103.4 is shown separately because raw rates compare fleet age as well as cars.

Compare the Volvo C30 with other cars

Nissan Leaf is highest at 103.4; Ford Ka is lowest at 103.2 — 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 S40 MOT statsVolvo V40 MOT stats

Similar risk

Nissan Leaf (index 103.4)Ford Ka (index 103.2)Vauxhall Crossland (index 103.2)

Same size class

how Mitsubishi Colt compareshow Skoda Rapid compareshow Jaguar XK compares

By build year

Volvo C30 2006Volvo C30 2007Volvo C30 2008Volvo C30 2009Volvo C30 2010Volvo C30 2011Volvo C30 2012Volvo C30 2013

By area

Volvo C30 MOT failure rate by postcode area

By failure group

Volvo C30 body, chassis and structure failuresVolvo C30 brakes failuresVolvo C30 vehicle identification failuresVolvo C30 lamps, reflectors and electrics failuresVolvo C30 noise, emissions and leaks failuresVolvo C30 road wheels failuresVolvo C30 seat belts and airbags failuresVolvo C30 steering failuresVolvo C30 suspension failuresVolvo C30 tyres failuresVolvo C30 visibility failures

Inspections abroad

Volvo C30 in NorwayVolvo C30 in FinlandVolvo C30 in the Netherlands