As a way of helping me improve the site I keep a record of searches which I sometimes review to help me check correct data is being returned. I've noticed a few odd things recently which lead me to wonder what on earth is going on with MOT results. I might see a few years of steady increases, only for clock not to turn around at the 100,000 mile mark and seemingly revert back to zero. At first I thought I was having a bad run of seeing clocked vehicles, but thought it would be odd for it not to raise suspicion at VOSA for anyone to have MOT mileage lower than their previous test. And now it appears its happening to pretty much every vehicle in the last few years (some are over 100,000 - but not recent tests). I'm now almost convinced that VOSA's system is only allowing test centres to enter 5 digits.
I'm now tempted to try and figure out a way of guessing if this has happened. If the mileage suddenly goes down I can add 100,000 back onto it to try and correct for the problem. It seems like a reasonable way as long as I display a warning to say the mileage might be off. In any case I really need to do something, since this is breaking the mileage estimates and graphs.
On a side note I need to set a minimum range for the estimates to work over - if your last two tests were in the order fail then pass its likely the range will only be over a day or so with no mileage and break the current mileage estimator. Should be a relatively easy fix. Oh - and the maps have gone live in beta on the main site. Have fun :-)
