Electric vehicles are doing better than petrol and diesel counterparts when it comes to MoTs, though EVs and hybrids are more likely to have defective tyres, according to carwow analysis of 50 million MoT tests. The statistics, obtained from the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) via freedom of information request, cover 49.9 million MoT tests carried out on vehicles aged between three to nine years, over 2019, 2020 and 2021, and show that just 14.84% of hybrid cars and 17.87% of pure electric cars failed their MoT at the first attempt between 2019 and 2021.
The average failure rates for petrol vehicles over those three years was 20.07%, while diesels brought up the field, with an average first-time failure rate of 23.11%. There are a number of possible reasons for EVs being more likely to pass their MoT test first time, including the fact that they are subject to fewer checks as part of the MoT.
Petrol and diesel vehicles can fail for producing excess levels of harmful emissions from their exhaust, for example, but EVs don’t produce any emissions on the road at all. Petrol and diesel vehicles are also subject to checks on their fuel lines, catalytic converters and diesel particulate filters; because EVs have none of these items, there are simply fewer opportunities for them to fail the test. One possible reason for the higher rate of failure among diesels, meanwhile, is that Class 4 vehicles include small vans, which often live hard lives.
