Reading a car's MOT history

The MOT history service is the most useful free document about any used car in Britain. It needs only the registration number, it is free, no account is required, and you do not have to own the vehicle to look. Records for cars, motorcycles and vans in Great Britain run from 2005 onwards.

What it gives you

For every test on record: the date, whether the vehicle passed or failed, the mileage recorded by the tester, the reasons for any failure, and the advisory notes. Test certificates can be downloaded.

How to read it, rather than just look at it

The mileage column is the point. Four or five consecutive readings tell you how the car has actually been used — a steady twelve thousand a year is a different vehicle from four years at two thousand followed by one at twenty-five. A reading that goes down, or a jump that does not fit the pattern, is a reason to stop and think before you go any further; see mileage and clocking.

Advisories are a maintenance diary. An advisory is the tester saying an item will need attention but is not yet a failure. The same advisory appearing at three consecutive tests is telling you it was never dealt with. Corrosion advisories in particular tend to escalate.

Failures tell you what kind of owner it had. Around four in ten cars fail at the first attempt, and the failure categories are dominated by things that regular maintenance would have caught. Lighting and signalling faults — often a blown bulb — account for the largest single share, with tyres and brakes following. DVSA has put the proportion of MOT faults avoidable through basic maintenance at close to half.

A car that repeatedly fails on bulbs and tyres was not being looked after. That says more about what else has been neglected than any individual defect does.

Gaps matter. A missing year usually means the car was off the road. That is not automatically bad — it may have been declared off-road legitimately — but it is a question to ask, and long periods of standing are harder on brakes, tyres and rubber than steady use.

What it does not tell you

The MOT is a minimum roadworthiness test at a moment in time. It is not a condition report and not a substitute for a service history: it says nothing about oil changes, cambelts, gearbox services or how the engine sounds from cold. Nor does it cover the legal and financial questions — theft markers, write-off records and outstanding finance need a history check.

Alongside it

The same free family of services will tell you whether the vehicle is currently taxed and when its MOT expires. Run both before you travel to see a car.