# What London drives to the test centre

> Petrol, diesel, hybrid and electric, as a share of every car London puts through the test.

- Category: Transport
- Cadence: annual
- Status: Published on a annual cadence.
- Dataset key: `mot-fleet-fuel`
- Source: [DVSA](https://open.data.dvsa.gov.uk/mot-anonymised/index.html)
- Licence: Open Government Licence v3.0 — [terms](https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/)
- Canonical page: [https://londongraph.com/g/what-london-drives-to-the-test-centre](https://londongraph.com/g/what-london-drives-to-the-test-centre)
- Machine-readable record: [https://londongraph.com/data/what-london-drives-to-the-test-centre](https://londongraph.com/data/what-london-drives-to-the-test-centre)

## Methodology

Fuel type recorded at initial MOT test for class 4 vehicles — cars and small vans — in the eight London postal areas. This is a picture of the tested fleet, not of new registrations and not of every vehicle on the road: a car needs no MOT for its first three years, so the newest and most electric part of the fleet is systematically absent, and this understates how far electrification has actually gone. A small number of rows carry a decoded label rather than DVSA's fuel code and are normalised to the same categories.

## Visualisations

- [Fuel transition](https://londongraph.com/g/what-london-drives-to-the-test-centre): Follow the fuel composition of class 4 vehicles old enough to enter the tested fleet.
- [Fleet age](https://londongraph.com/g/what-london-drives-to-the-test-centre?view=age): Compare vehicle-age bands rather than relying on one mean.
- [Fuel × age](https://londongraph.com/g/what-london-drives-to-the-test-centre?view=fuel-age): Show how petrol, diesel, hybrid and electric tests divide across age bands.
- [Testing season](https://londongraph.com/g/what-london-drives-to-the-test-centre?view=season): Arrange annual test volumes by month of the year.

## Citation guidance

Attribute the original publisher named above and identify LondonGraph as the visualisation and methodology layer. Do not describe live values as a historical census, and do not present placeholder values as observations.