The most popular car makes, models and colours in every county, postcode area and nation, from the MOT test record of 28.9 million cars. Which places stand out, where electric cars have taken hold, and what is the average car where you live?
Every car in Great Britain over three years old must pass an MOT test each year, and the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency publishes every test, stripped of anything personal, as open data. Each record carries the car's make, model, colour, fuel, engine size, the date it was first used and the postcode area of the garage that tested it. I streamed the whole 2025 file, 42,728,066 test records, and kept each vehicle once, at its last test of the year. That leaves 31,731,781 vehicles. MOT class 4 also covers light vans and pick-ups, so I set aside 2,879,354 of those (9.1%) by model, which leaves 28,852,427 cars, 28,850,439 of them tested in a known postcode area.
Put them together and the average British car is a blue Ford Fiesta, 10.7 years old, with a 1,666 cc engine: Ford is the most common make (12.0% of cars), black the most common colour (20.0%) and the Fiesta, which Ford stopped making in 2023, still the most common model (1,313,412 cars, 4.6%). Blue is the Fiesta's own most common colour. The map shows how that picture changes from place to place.
Ford leads in 89 of the 118 postcode areas, and in 151 of the 207 counties and unitary authorities of Great Britain. The exceptions cluster. Volkswagen takes 13 areas, mostly in the prosperous south of England around London. Vauxhall takes 9: Luton, where Vauxhall built vehicles for more than a century, has the strongest showing of any make anywhere (15.5% of cars), and the others are around Glasgow, Dundee and Falkirk, Teesside, Sunderland and the Wirral and Chester. Toyota leads in 4 areas, three in and around London, where the hybrid Toyota Prius is the most common model of all in east London, and the fourth in Shetland. Mercedes-Benz leads in north-west London and Southall, and Nissan in south-east London.
Colour is less varied. Black is the most common colour in 88 postcode areas, white in 17 and blue in 13. The Ford Fiesta is the most common model in 98 areas, the Vauxhall Corsa in 10, the Volkswagen Golf in 6 and the Toyota Prius in 2.
Type a town, village, county, postcode area (such as LS or BT) or a full postcode. You get the average car for the county and the postcode area: the most common make, model and colour, with the average age and engine size, and how many cars in a hundred are battery electric.
England's average car is a blue Ford Fiesta, 10.9 years old. Wales is similar but even more of a Ford country (13.1% of cars are Fords) and more diesel (40.0% of tested cars, against 33.2% in England). Scotland is different on three counts: its most common colour is white (19.0%, just ahead of black at 18.1%), its most common model is the Vauxhall Corsa, and Vauxhall runs Ford close (10.4% against 10.7%). Scotland's tested cars are also younger: 9.2 years on average, against 10.9 in England and 10.7 in Wales. Against Great Britain as a whole, the make most over-represented in both Scotland and Wales is the budget brand Dacia (2.1 and 1.8 times its British share).
Northern Ireland needs a different source, because its MOTs are run by the Driver and Vehicle Agency, which publishes test totals and pass rates but, as far as I could find, no open data on makes or colours. The Department for Transport's licensing tables do cover the whole United Kingdom, so subtracting Great Britain from the UK gives Northern Ireland's 1,055,481 licensed cars by make and model. They tell a distinct story: Volkswagen, not Ford, is the most common make (13.1%), Audi is second (9.1%, against 5.9% in Great Britain) and Ford only third. The Volkswagen Golf is the most common model (4.9%). Diesel still powers 50.6% of Northern Ireland's licensed cars, against 28.7% in Great Britain.
Colours of Britain's tested cars
Share of 28.9 million cars, 2025
Britain's cars are dressed almost entirely in six colours: black, grey, white, blue, silver and red cover more than nine cars in ten. Vans are another matter: 44% of the vans and pick-ups I set aside are white. But the mix has moved a long way. Sort the cars by the year they were first used and grey rises from 3.0% of cars first used in 2000 to 26.1% of those from 2022, while silver, the colour of the millennium, falls from 27.6% to 6.1%.
Colour by year of first use
Share of each year's surviving cars, tested in 2025
To find the places whose cars look least like their nation's, I compared each place's mix of makes with its nation's and measured how much of the mix would have to change to match (the dissimilarity index, from 0 for identical to 1 for nothing in common). The most unusual postcode area in Britain is Shetland (ZE): 14.4% of its cars are Toyotas, 3.6 times Scotland's share, and the Yaris is its most common model. Next come London's postcode areas, where Toyota, Lexus and Mercedes-Benz stand out, perhaps reflecting the capital's large private hire trade, in which hybrid Toyotas are a familiar sight. In east London the Prius is the most common car of all (4.5% of cars).
The MOT record is a poor guide to electric cars, because most are less than three years old and so have not yet had a test. For them I used the Department for Transport's licensing statistics, which count every licensed car by the keeper's neighbourhood across the whole United Kingdom. I counted privately kept cars only, because company and lease cars are registered at head-office addresses and pile up in a few places. At the end of 2025 there were 2.5 battery electric cars for every 100 privately kept cars in the UK. The highest rates are in central London: the City of London (7.7 per 100), Camden (7.6) and Westminster (7.6). The lowest are in Northern Ireland, where Fermanagh and Omagh has 0.4 per 100, and the lowest in Great Britain is Na h-Eileanan Siar, the Western Isles (0.7). Islands are not all alike: Orkney (3.8) is second only to East Renfrewshire (4.0) in Scotland, while Shetland has 1.2.
Most electric
Least electric
Fuel by year of first use
Share of each year's surviving cars, tested in 2025
The MOT record does show the rise and fall of diesel. Of the cars first used in 2014 and still on the road, 46.8% are diesels; of those from 2022, only 7.4% are, while hybrids make up 26.4% and fully electric cars 16.5%.
The oldest cars are in the south-west of England. The average tested car in Torbay is 12.4 years old, followed by Dorset (12.2) and Devon (12.0). The youngest are in west central Scotland, around Glasgow: the Motherwell postcode area averages 8.7 years. Across Britain, 6.1% of tested cars were first used in 2005 or before, and 34,305 were first used before 1980.
Oldest cars
Youngest cars
MOT data. The DVSA publishes every MOT test as anonymised open data. I used the 2025 results file (twelve monthly files, 42,728,066 records), read straight from the publisher's server in the browser in pieces, so the 4.8 GB file was never stored. I kept MOT class 4 (cars, taxis, light vans and similar), and counted each vehicle once, at its latest test of 2025 (8,481,227 earlier tests and retests of the same vehicles were dropped). Model names in the data mix short families ("FIESTA") with long trim names for newer cars, so I grouped them into families by rule. I set aside vans and pick-ups by family (Transit, Transporter, Berlingo, Ranger, Hilux and others) and by van-only makes; some car-derived vans will remain.
Places. Each test carries the postcode area (the letters at the start of a postcode) of the garage, not the owner's address, so people who drive to a garage over a boundary are counted where the garage is. To get counties and unitary authorities, I shared each postcode area's cars out by the share of its live residential postcodes in each county (ONS Postcode Directory, August 2026, 1,721,096 postcodes). Nations are the sums of their counties. Postcode area outlines on the map are approximate: I drew them around the centres of postcodes grouped by neighbourhood (Voronoi cells, clipped to the coast).
Electric cars and Northern Ireland. DfT vehicle licensing statistics count licensed cars (VEH0125) and plug-in vehicles (VEH0145) by neighbourhood for the whole UK; I used the end of 2025 and private keepers. Northern Ireland's makes and models are the UK total minus Great Britain in DfT table VEH0120.
Limits. Cars under three years old have not had an MOT, so the MOT figures describe cars aged three and over: that is why the MOT count (28.9 million) is below the 32,728,149 cars licensed in Great Britain, and why the newest makes and electric cars are under-counted. Colour is the colour recorded when the car was registered. County figures are blends of postcode areas and should be read as broad patterns. "Average car" means the most common make, model and colour together with the mean age and engine size; few cars match all of these at once.