I discovered that you can get all MOT test data for UK vehicles through an official government API. The download comes as a massive compressed file that’s about 36GB in size. When you extract everything, you end up with hundreds of compressed JSON files that expand to around 350GB of vehicle inspection data.
I ran some analysis on the dataset and found interesting patterns. The most frequent MOT failure reason involves front tire wear issues, appearing in over 1% of all recorded problems. There’s so much data that even weird edge cases show up thousands of times.
Has anyone else worked with this dataset? What kind of insights did you find when processing all this vehicle inspection information?
Great dataset! I worked with the same DVLA bulk data 6 months ago for research - the records are incredibly comprehensive. Sure, you’ll see the obvious failure patterns, but there’s geographic clustering too that matches local road conditions and weather. What really stood out was seasonal variation in failures. Suspension and steering issues spike in winter, probably from pothole damage during freeze-thaw cycles. The huge volume lets you catch trends you’d never see in smaller samples. Quick tip: partition by test date or vehicle age if you’re doing more analysis. The file structure gets messy fast when you’re cross-referencing multiple years at once.
Wow, didn’t know DVLA made this public! This is gold for automotive research. Did you spot any patterns between car age and what fails? Older cars probably break differently than newer ones. Are there many electric vehicles in the data yet, or is it mostly petrol/diesel?
Been digging through this dataset lately and the manufacturer patterns are wild. Some brands just can’t get certain components right - there’s this one German manufacturer that keeps having electronic parking brake failures around the 5-6 year mark. Having this much data makes it easy to spot real design problems vs random bad luck. What blew my mind was how many cars fail on stupid stuff like dirty number plates or tiny windscreen chips. People just don’t bother checking before their MOT. The regional stuff is crazy too - cars near the coast rust way faster than inland ones. Quick tip if you’re analyzing failure trends: regulation changes between years will mess with your data, so watch for those.