Out of 3 cars that go though 1st MOT, only 1 makes it to 2nd?

I think what the sharpness of the peack actually shows is that the younger the car, the more likely the MoT will be on time. Otherwise 2 in

3 cars come off the road between years 3 & 4 which seems unlikely (unless a truly vast amount of the fleet market gets shipped abroad when it comes off lease.)

It wouldn't surprise me if that was the peak period for insurance write- offs.

Old enough for the value to be low enough to be easily written off for relatively minor damage from the average low-speed traffic bingle. Complicated and recent enough that repair costs can easily be high.

Young enough that the value is still high enough for the owners to insist on putting them through insurance, rather than kick 'em straight with a few eBay/scrapper panels.

Add in the potential for very large mechanical and/or electrical repair bills, and I don't think I'm surprised at there being an "early death peak" around that kind of middle-age.

No, it's got a 50:50 chance of it happening at spot on the same day. If = =

you look at the paired test results it's rather more obvious. What you'r= e =

interested in is the area under the graph over the ear rather than the =

peak number.

The drop in numbers from Year 3 to Year 4 is staggering. This looks very fishy. Where do all these quite new cars end up? With RHD cars, there are not many opportunities for export? So what is going on?

Perhaps there were fewer new cars sold for the 4 year MOT stats, it might have been that the banking crises was more serious 2008-9, assuming that the stats took some time to produce. New car sales are obviously very sensitive to the availability of finance.

Countries: 76 drive on the left, 163 on the right. (But not 76 RHD, 163 LHD, see TG Burma Special!)

Yes it me reading it wrongly.

The lower the spike the bigger the "Q". So for 2m new vehicles a year, within 3 days on 1st MOT, within 5-6 days for 2nd, within 10 days for 3rd.

Or the curves on howmanyleft would tell a far different story.

Which tells you that very few punters ask for 12 months MOT when they bu= y.

True, I saw that in Top Gear. :)

But UK has not many RHD countries in the neighbourhood. You would think that secondhand cars for export would not ship very far.

E.g. Denmark imports many secondhand cars from Germany. Registration tax on new cars in Denmark are almost 200%, but imported secondhand cars are taxed on their secondhand value. The Germans have higher turnover of new cars.

Oh, wait. The Irish import a lot of used cars from Japan.

The figures seem to show that the average for scrapping a car is around

100,000 miles and 60,000+ of these miles occur in the first 3 years (maybe much less than 3 years).

It may indicate that a lot of cars are purchased as fleet cars and have large mileage figures in the first 1/2/3 years before going into the second hand market where the miles per year fall to much less than

10,000 - a high percentage doing 5,000 miles/year or less.