The used-car trade has spent years treating a high odometer reading on an electric car as a warning sign. An analysis of 47.4 million British MOT tests says the opposite, and says it more loudly the further the car has been driven.
The work was carried out by the transport research group New AutoMotive for the British Vehicle Rental and Leasing Association (BVRLA), and published on 22 September 2026 to open Used EV Week.
Below 60,000 miles there is no story
Once age and mileage are accounted for together, low-mileage electric and petrol cars fail at almost identical rates. The divergence starts at around 60,000 miles, where the electric failure rate flattens out near 16% and the petrol one keeps climbing.
| Mileage band | Electric fail rate | Petrol fail rate |
|---|---|---|
| 20,000–40,000 miles | 12.0% | 11.7% |
| 90,000–120,000 miles | 16.5% | 22.1% |
| Above 120,000 miles | 16.0% | 23.5% |
In the 90,000-to-120,000 band that makes an electric car roughly a quarter less likely to fail than a petrol equivalent of the same age.
They also stay on the road longer
The study tracked whether a car came back for another MOT within 30 months. At fifteen years old, 94.6% of electric cars returned against 88.1% of petrol cars — an implied road-exit rate of 5.4% versus 11.9%.
"High mileage isn't a proxy for poor condition in the way buyers have traditionally assumed," said New AutoMotive chief executive Ben Nelmes. BVRLA chief executive Toby Poston put the consumer version more directly: "Mileage alone should not put consumers off. A well-maintained, higher-mileage electric car can be an extremely durable used vehicle."
The tyre bill is the honest caveat
The same dataset records battery-electric cars with about 1.8 times as many tyre defects as petrol cars — attributed mostly to earlier EVs adapted from combustion platforms, though weight and instant torque are not going away. Suspension ran the other way: between 60,000 and 90,000 miles, electric cars recorded 4.7 defects per 100 tests against 6.1 for petrol.
What an MOT does not look at
An MOT is a statutory roadworthiness check — brakes, tyres, suspension, steering, lights. It does not measure battery state of health, cell degradation or charging performance. An electric car can pass every test of its life and still have lost range, which is why state-of-health data from half a million battery tests and Britain's planned mandatory battery health certificate answer a question this study does not.
Why there is no European version of this study
The analysis exists because Britain publishes the underlying records. EU member states run periodic technical inspections under Directive 2014/45/EU, but the per-test results are not released in comparable open form, so the same read cannot be run on a German, French or Czech fleet. For now the best European evidence on how electric cars age at high mileage is British.
What the EU is adding instead is the half an MOT misses: from November 2026, new cars sold in the bloc need an environmental vehicle passport that discloses battery state of health.
What it means for a used Tesla in Britain
More than for most brands, because of timing. Right-hand-drive Model 3 deliveries began in mid-2019, an MOT is first due on a car's third birthday, and high-mileage private-hire and company Teslas are exactly the cars now filling the bands where the gap opens. The study does not break results out by model, so nothing here is Tesla-specific — but it removes the assumption that a 100,000-mile electric car is a worn-out one, in a market where used electric cars already sell faster than petrol ones.
The practical reading is narrow but useful. Mileage tells you less about an electric car's roadworthiness than about a petrol one's — and still nothing about its battery. Two separate checks.