5 minute read.
In a previous post I explained how and why I came up with the CarXpert ratings system. In this post I’m going to talk about how to get the most out of CarXpert ratings, and a little bit about interpreting MOT history. Now, if you read the earlier post, you’ll know that one of the reasons for coming up with the ratings was to avoid having to read MOT histories, but if you’ve got a couple of cars with similar ratings, you might want to have a look as a bit of a tie breaker.
CarXpert rates cars on a 1 to 5 star scale where 1 is the worst and 5 is the best. There are ratings for issues that caused a car to fail an MOT, issues that were just reported by the tester “advisories”), and an overall rating. It analyses a car’s complete MOT history to come up with the ratings. If you haven’t seen the CarXpert ratings system in action, here’s a link where you can enter the registration number of a car that you’re interested in.
A car that’s average in terms of its MOT history will get 3 stars, and that’s not a bad rating – it’s got the kind of MOT history you’d expect. Cars with 1 or 2 stars are worse than average, and we’d suggest you try and avoid those. A 4 star car is better than average, and a 5 star car has never had any issues mentioned at any MOT. We’d suggest it’s worth spending the time to find a 4 or 5 star car as they’re more likely to have been maintained well and be in good condition.
The reason CarXpert gives separate ratings for MOT failure items and advisories is that it gives you more information when it comes to deciding which are the best cars in your price range.
So, for example, you might have two cars with an overall three star rating.
- One car has 4 stars for fails (better than average) and 2 stars for advisories (worse than average).
- The other car has 2 stars for fails and 4 stars for advisories.
Personally I’d lean towards the first car, because it’s done better on fails (serious items needing immediate attention) than the second car. Advisories by definition are not as serious as fails, and MOT testers will sometimes record things that aren’t actually a problem as advisories, as I’ll explain below.
This is also when a look at the MOT history can be worthwhile.
After you’ve got a CarXpert rating for a car then you can view its MOT history on CarXpert. If you save the car to your shortlist then you’ll be able to refer back to its MOT history. Here’s an example of what it would look like:
So, this car has a mixture of failure and advisory items. Now you might think there’s quite a lot of issues listed, but this is a car that’s 19 years old and has done nearly 100,000 miles, and over its complete MOT history it’s better than average, so it’s a four-star car.
When it comes to advisories, you’re particularly interested in what’s been reported at the most recent MOT – these are things that may still need attention by a new owner. If we look at this car we can see:
If you were thinking of buying this car then you might want to ask the seller if these items have been fixed, and if not, get an estimate from a garage for how much they would cost to repair.
On the other hand, you might see something like this:
All the tester is saying is that they couldn’t see everything they would usually inspect. That’s something that’s increasingly common with cars as manufacturers fit covers under cars to reduce drag or to protect components. You’ll also see advisories mentioning that a child seat was fitted so a seat belt couldn’t be inspected or that things had to be cleared off the dashboard – and some similar advisories. Therefore it’s possible for a car to pick up a number of advisories over the years that don’t actually indicate the car needs any repairs.
This doesn’t happen so much that it makes advisories irrelevant, but it’s worth being aware of, and if you’re interested in a car that scores well on failures but has a poor rating for advisories, look at the history to see if a lot of those advisories are about undertrays or child seats being fitted.
A couple of other things to bear in mind –
- It’s not that common to see a car that has a good score for failures and a poor rating for advisories – more often the scores are similar, a car with a good rating for failures will tend to have a good rating for failures, and poor scores also tend to be consistent.
- Corrosion – if you’re looking at older cars, where it’s possible that rust might be a problem, then advisories saying the tester can’t see all the underbody are more of a concern, because it’s possible that there may be corrosion that can’t be seen – and the tester may be covering themselves in case it later turns out there was corrosion. So, for older cars make sure there aren’t any mentions of corrosion in the MOT history, but ultimately you’ll need to have a proper look for rust when viewing the car (a topic for another blog).
One final point – we came up with the ratings system as a way of helping people narrow down their search for their next car in a quick and simple way. We’re not saying it’s the only thing you need to look at before choosing a used car. Once you’ve decided which cars you might want to go and view there’s still a number of things you need to look out for, and we’ll be providing more tools and services to help with those in the future
I hope you found this post useful and interesting, be great to hear your comments.