UK MOT Data: High-Mileage EVs Fail Roadworthiness Tests Less Often Than Petrol Cars

Britain’s MOT is an annual roadworthiness check that most vehicles have to pass once they reach three years old. It is a blunt instrument — a pass or fail plus a list of defects — but it is applied to millions of cars every year, and the accumulated records offer an unusually large set of observations about how different vehicles age. An analysis of 47.4 million MOT records used that data to ask a simple question: as mileage piles up, do electric cars hold up worse than petrol ones? On these numbers, no.

The gap opens up at high mileage

Researchers split vehicles by odometer reading and compared electric cars with comparable petrol models. Between 90,000 and 120,000 miles, petrol cars failed 22.1% of tests; electric cars failed 16.5%, roughly three-quarters of the petrol rate. Past 120,000 miles the figures were 23.5% for petrol and 16% for electric. At lower mileages the two groups were much closer, which means the electric advantage builds with distance instead of being present from the start.

Public debate about EV durability has been noisy for years. Early models were expensive, their batteries were unfamiliar, and used-car buyers had little independent data to work from. MOT records are an imperfect source for that argument, but they are a big one: the same checklist is applied to every car, and the results are collected at testing stations rather than assembled from owner surveys.

Tyres are the weak point

The clearest electric-specific problem in the data is tyres. Wear on EVs ran about twice that of combustion models, the analysis found. That matters twice over, because it raises running costs and because worn tyres are among the items an inspection can fail. What drives the difference is not settled here; the finding is that the gap exists and is large.

Battery health is a separate matter. The MOT does not assess the condition of a traction battery, so degradation and capacity loss never show up in this dataset. A high-mileage EV that passes its test may still have lost a meaningful share of its original range, and these records cannot tell you whether it has. Read the failure rates as evidence about brakes, suspension, tyres, lights and the rest of the inspected hardware, and not as a verdict on the pack.

What the finding does and does not settle

The researchers argue the results contradict the belief that high-mileage EVs should be scrapped. On the items the test actually covers, electric cars with six-figure mileages were less likely to fail than petrol cars of similar age. That is a useful counterweight to assumptions about EV longevity, and it is a narrower claim than ‘electric cars last longer.’

The dataset has boundaries. It covers one country’s inspection regime, which does not test battery condition. It records pass or fail at a point in time, so it cannot follow a single car through its life, and it does not separate results by brand, battery chemistry or how the car was used. Cars that cover very high mileages quickly may also sit differently within the top mileage band than cars that take a decade to get there.

Those caveats do not cancel the headline. If high-mileage EVs were genuinely fragile, the failure rates in the top bands should be worse than petrol, not better. They are better, by a margin wide enough to be interesting. The two things a used-EV buyer still cannot learn from this data are the ones that matter most to them: how much battery capacity is left, and how much the faster tyre wear adds to the bill.