4 Million Vehicle Mileage Check

Please note: We have since released a larger mileage test in September 2020, where we tested the mileage of 7 million vehicles.

Vehicle mileage issues and clocking have been a problem that has plagued the used car market for many years, In December 2019 we tested the mileage of 2.5 million vehicles. This time we ramped up the test and went for 4 million vehicles.

What counts as a mileage discrepancy?

There are 2 things that count as a mileage discrepancy in this test:

1. The mileage has been lowered between MOT tests (e.g. 40,000 on 19/08/2018 then 30,000 on 19/08/2019).
2. The vehicle has a mixture of odometer unit readings (miles and kilometres).

We offer the same mileage check as performed in this test for free on our initial report, you can check any vehicle yourself in seconds below:

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What we found

We started the 4 million mileage check on 22nd Feb 2020 and finished on 10th March 2020. We then started compiling and working through the data and published our findings on the 18th march 2020.

Total vehicles checked: 4,000,000 (4 Million)
Total vehicles failed: 252,834
Total fail percentage: 6.32%

The findings broken down

Failed on lowered mileage: 236,455 out of 4,000,000
Percentage of above: 5.91%

Failed from mixture of odometer readings (miles and kilometres): 28,368 of 4,000,000
Percentage of above: 0.70%

Failed on both mixed readings and lowered mileage: 11,889 out of 4,000,000
Percentage of above: 0.29%

Fails by make & model

We used the data from this test to create a list of which makes and models had the highest fail rate, we only included vehicles that had more than 1000 fails in total.

Explanation of the above data:

• Make & Model – Vehicle make and model.
• Total Failed – How many failed out of the Total Checked for this make + model.
• Total Checked – The total checked from the 4,000,000 list.
• Fail Rate – The fail percentage for the make + model (worked out using Total Failed and Total Checked data)

Fails by year, make & model

We used the data from this test to create another list of fails by year, make and model. We only included vehicles that had more than 450 fails in total.

Explanation of the above data:

• Year, Make & Model – Vehicle year, make and model.
• Total Failed – How many failed out of the Total Checked for this year, make + model.
• Total Checked – The total checked from the 4,000,000 list.
• Fail Rate – The fail percentage for the make + model (worked out using Total Failed and Total Checked data)

Average annual mileage of passed VS failed vehicle

We took the average yearly mileage of passed and failed vehicles from this test. This is what we found.

Average Yearly Mileage of Passed Vehicle (‭3,747,166‬ Passed):

9670

Average Yearly Mileage of Failed Vehicle (252,834 Failed):

8942

Estimated vehicles with mileage discrepancies in the UK

Below we worked out the estimated number of vehicles in the UK with mileage issues. According to racfoundation.org there were 38.9 million licensed vehicles in the UK as of September 2019. In this test we found a fail rate of 6.32%.

6.32% of 38,900,000 =

2,458,480

More info about this data

How was this test performed?

We used a huge list of registrations to make this test happen, we started collecting mileage data on 22nd Feb 2020 and finished on 10th March 2020 (17 days).

Where did we get the mileage data from?

We used the .gov.uk MOT API to get the mileage records from MOT tests.

Why did we check so many vehicles?

The more vehicles we check the clearer the picture becomes on mileage discrepancies, for this reason we wanted as much data as possible.