All generations and engines together · 11,461 MOT tests in the 2025 data
One of the worst city cars per mile driven. Watch corrosion and suspension. A risky used buy. Check the MOT history for repeating corrosion advisories before you go.
Owner folklore from forums and the motoring press, with how well each report stands up. Most of it never shows up in an MOT, which is why this section exists at all.
Cars built between mid-2006 and August 2014 were covered by a factory recall for the front passenger airbag inflator: the propellant could degrade with age, humidity and heat, and rupture the inflator casing on deployment. This is a genuine safety recall, not folklore, so it is worth checking it was actioned. The fix is a free dealer replacement of the inflator or airbag unit.
A recurring complaint on the 1.2 and 1.4 petrol engines: an ignition coil pack breaks down and the car judders, loses power under load, or cuts out and struggles to restart, often with the engine management light on. It turns up at any age once a coil gets old rather than at one set mileage. A replacement coil is a cheap, straightforward fix, but repeat failures on other cylinders down the line aren't unusual.
Owners repeatedly report a scatter of small electrical faults rather than one big one: central locking not responding to the key fob, window switches and regulators sticking or going slow, dash illumination or the rev counter and fuel gauge lighting dropping out, and interior light switches failing. None of it is officially acknowledged as a design fault, and each fix is cheap on its own, but on some cars it has meant several dealer visits over a couple of years. Treat it as ageing wiring and connectors rather than one culprit part.
Some owners report the clutch going off early, biting point creeping up and slipping under load, blamed on the amount of stop-start town driving these cars do rather than a parts fault. Others rack up well over 100,000 miles on the original clutch with careful use. A replacement is a routine job, roughly £250-450 fitted, and there's no evidence it's anything other than usage-driven wear.
The 1.2 three-cylinder Fox uses a timing chain, but the 1.4 runs a cambelt that needs changing on time, roughly every 4 years or 60,000 miles regardless of how little it's covered. Miss it and a snapped belt on the 1.4 will bend valves, an engine-out repair running into four figures. Ask for cambelt history specifically if the car you're viewing is a 1.4, it's meaningless on a 1.2.
Ranked from this model’s own MOT record, then from what owners report.
Saveable checklistThe physical checks its own defect data says are worth your time, most telling first.
These judge the seller’s upkeep rather than the model, and they are where the haggling money is.
Drawn from the reports above rather than the MOT data. These are the model-specific ones.
Computed from DVSA MOT results, all of Great Britain, 2025. Nothing here is opinion.
Share of tests where each item was recorded. The dark tick is the class average across all tracked models; bars are scaled within each group.
The rows that judge the model rather than its keeper. 11,460 tests in this band.
Tyres, pads and stone chips say more about how the car was driven and maintained than about how it was built.
Same segment (City cars), best MOT record first. Compare before you shortlist.