The Conservative government pledged to make public data more accessible and for all us petrolheads, that mean VOSA MoT data could be properly analysed for the first time – exciting stuff! The team at good ol’ Honest John duly set about crunching the results of over 200 million MoT tests. It was a mammoth task, not helped by lots of human errors in the data, but the majority agree that Honest John have done a brilliant job at presenting the data in a useful way.
So here at the UK Renault Vel Satis Owners Club, we wanted to summarise the main points from Honest John’s MoT Files survey, for all us Vel Satis fanatics out there. They looked at 1,005 MoT test results for Vel Satis cars, carried out between October 2010 and September 2011, covering 2002 to 2005 model year Vel Sati.
Our Vel Sati achieved an overall MoT pass rate of only 53.3%. The graphs provided by Honest John indicate that, whilst general MoT pass rates across all makes and models of cars is slowly increased as a trend when it came to all 2002-2004 registration vehicles tested, the Vel Satis pass rate for cars of this age slightly declined over those three years, from the mid-to-high 50s down to the low 50s (percentage).
Another graph provided by HJ shows that when you look at mileage figures in relation to MoT pass rates, it drops from about 72% for vehicles with 25k miles on the clock at the time of the test, down to about 47% for vehicles with over 100k miles on them. But Vel Satis cars slightly defy that general trend, as Vel Sati with over 100k miles on the clock achieved a higher pass rate than those with between 80k-90k on them.
The Vel Satis MoT failures board was topped by steering problems, which accounted for 22.7% of fails. Lighting and signalling were close behind with 20.4%, suspension with 13.7%, brakes with 11.7% and tyres with 10.4%. Accounting for 2.3% of Vel Satis MoT fails was fuel and exhaust, with body and structure at the bottom of the list, accounting for 0.4% of MoT test fails.
For the three-year period assessed, about 440 of the Vel Sati tested were 2002 models, 610 were 2003 models and only 120 or so were 2004 models.
Looking at 2003 model year Renault Vel Satis cars, they achieved a 52.3% MoT pass rate and all those vehicles had between 60k and 100k miles on their clocks. Hazard light switches and lights, registration number plate lights and headlights accounted for the majority of failures for 2003 cars, as did track rod ends, ball joints and steering arms. Many of our members have experienced MoT failures due to the latter. Overall, 2003 year Vel Sati were rated as being 15% worse than other makes and models of cars from 2003.
So there you have it – hope you found some of these figures interesting!
