What Britain Drives: Car Makes, Models, Colours and Ages by County and Postcode Area from the 2025 MOT Record

Which cars do people drive in different parts of the United Kingdom? I answer with the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency's anonymised MOT test data for 2025, read in full (42,728,066 test records) and reduced to one record per vehicle: 31,731,781 class 4 vehicles, of which 28,852,427 are cars once light vans and pick-ups are set aside. Each car is placed by the postcode area of its testing garage, and postcode areas are shared out to counties and unitary authorities by their live postcodes. Ford is the most common make in Great Britain (12.0% of cars) and in 89 of 118 postcode areas; black is the most common colour (20.0%); and the Ford Fiesta, out of production since 2023, is the most common model (4.6%). Scotland differs: white is its leading colour and the Vauxhall Corsa its leading model, and its tested cars are younger (9.2 years against 10.9 in England). The most unusual postcode area is Shetland, where 14.4% of cars are Toyotas, followed by London's areas. Grey has risen from 3.0% of surviving cars first used in 2000 to 26.1% of those from 2022. For electric cars and for Northern Ireland, which the MOT data do not cover, I use Department for Transport licensing statistics: privately kept battery electric cars number 2.5 per 100 private cars in the UK, from 7.7 in the City of London to 0.4 in Fermanagh and Omagh, and Volkswagen, not Ford, leads in Northern Ireland. Interactive version: https://maps.tristanhotham.com/cars/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/cars. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/28/cars/.