Good & Bad was the bit of Honest John you checked before you went to look at a car. Two lists per model, the good and the bad, built from what owners actually reported going wrong, and it closed with the rest of the site in August 2026. We've spent the time since rebuilding the fault side of it, and 593 documented faults have gone into our known-problems database as a result.
What was Honest John's Good & Bad section?
Good & Bad was a per-model summary of what a car got right and what it got wrong, sitting inside the car-by-car section. The bad half was the valuable one. It wasn't a road test written on a launch event, it was an accumulating record of faults that real owners had reported, dated, tied to a specific generation and very often to a specific engine. That last part is what made it useful. "The Focus is reliable" is worthless. "The Mk2 1.6 petrol lets rainwater into the spark plug holes" is something you can go and check on the car in front of you.
It also aged well, because it was cumulative. A fault reported in 2011 stayed on the page, so by the time a car was ten years old the page told you what a decade of owners had found. Nothing else in the UK did that for free.
Where has Good & Bad gone?
It was retired, not migrated. Honest John closed in August 2026 and every honestjohn.co.uk address now redirects to Drive.co.uk, which took the car reviews across and left the data features behind. We've covered what happened to Honest John in full, and Real MPG went the same way before we rebuilt it as a free section.
The fault information now lives on our common problems pages, free, one page per model, rebuilt from the archived Good & Bad pages plus our own research, specialist and owner-club sources and DVSA recall data. We're not affiliated with Honest John or Volkswagen Financial Services. Every row says where it came from.
What is the advert not telling you?
Paste the advert text and the registration. We read it against the car's DVSA MOT history and our known-faults database, then tell you what the seller left out.
Check an advert now (free) →How much fault data did the rebuild actually add?
593 records, which took the database from 231 rows to 824. 736 of those are live on the pages right now, across 41 makes and 126 model pages. The rest are minor niggles we're deliberately holding back until the report can score a £200 annoyance separately from a snapped timing chain, because a page full of squeaky trim doesn't help anybody decide whether to buy a car.
Each row is pinned to the things that make a fault checkable rather than generic:
| Field | Example |
|---|---|
| Generation | Corsa D (2006-2014) |
| Year range | 2006 to 2014, which is often narrower than the generation |
| Engine variant | 1.25 petrol, or 2.2 i-CDTi manuals, or all Xtronic CVT automatics |
| Symptoms | What you'd actually notice, in the order you'd notice it |
| Typical repair cost | A UK range, not a quote |
| Source badge | Owner reports, Editorial, Specialist mechanic or Official recall |
365 of the live rows carry the Owner reports badge, which is the material the Good & Bad pages were made of. Safety recalls sit in the same table and show as £0, because a recall is free to have done, and a car that has never had one done is a different proposition from one that has.
Did you just copy Honest John's pages?
No, and the distinction matters enough to spell out. A fault is a fact: the Corsa D's ECU fails when rainwater reaches it, whoever writes that down. Facts aren't anybody's property. The way Honest John wrote them up was their work, and it belongs to them.
So the archived pages were used as a source, not as copy. Every entry in our database was written from scratch and structured our way, into the fields in that table: generation, year range, engine variant, symptoms in the order you'd notice them, a typical repair cost, a source badge. None of that structure existed on a Good & Bad page, which ran as one long list covering a whole model. Where a row came out of the archive it says so, and the archive reference is kept on the record.
We're not affiliated with Honest John or Volkswagen Financial Services, we don't republish their writing, and we're not pretending to be them. What we've done is take information that a lot of people found useful, that was about to become unreachable, and rebuild it into something you can actually use against a specific advert.
Which faults are on the site because of this?
Four out of the 593, all badged Owner reports, all on pages you can read right now:
- Ford Fiesta, 1.25 petrol, 2008 to 2018. Exhaust valve burnout, usually on cylinder three, which can be caused by faulty spark plugs or the engine running lean. Typically shows up between 35,000 and 50,000 miles. Repair £1,000 to £1,500, on a car that often sells for not much more than that.
- Nissan Qashqai, Xtronic CVT automatics, 2009 to 2014. Transmission failure causing juddering, loss of drive and limp mode, reported from low mileages and just outside warranty. £3,500 to £7,500. This one is the reason to care which gearbox is in the advert.
- Honda Civic, 2.2 i-CDTi manuals, 2006 to 2011. Dual mass flywheel and clutch failing in as little as 10,000 to 30,000 miles, against a normal life of 80,000 to 120,000. £1,000 to £1,800.
- Vauxhall Corsa, Corsa D, all engines. The ECU fails after rainwater gets to it, either from screen drains pointing at it or blocked bulkhead vent drains flooding the well. £950 to £1,200.
Notice what those four have in common. None of them is the sort of thing a review mentions, all of them are specific to an engine or a gearbox rather than a model, and every one of them costs more than the difference between a good example and a bad one.
How much can you trust an owner report?
Treat it as a report, not a diagnosis, which is exactly how Honest John treated it. Owners tell you what happened to their car and what the garage said it was. They aren't running a controlled study, they're more likely to write in when something goes wrong than when nothing does, and a handful of reports on a model that sold 200,000 units is a pattern worth knowing about rather than proof your car will do it.
That's why the badge is on every row instead of everything being flattened into one voice. A row badged Owner reports means owners reported it. A row badged Official recall means the DVSA has it on file. A row badged Specialist mechanic came from someone who fixes these for a living. They're different weights of evidence and you should weigh them differently. Repair costs are typical UK ranges rather than quotes, and what you actually pay depends on the car's condition and your garage.
Can I still read the original Good & Bad pages?
Some of them. The Internet Archive crawled Honest John for years, so searching web.archive.org for the old car-by-car address will often turn up a snapshot from before August 2026 with the Good & Bad lists intact. It's free and it's worth knowing about.
It's also slower and less useful than what we built from it, and it would be daft not to say so. An archived page gives you one long list covering a whole model, engines and generations mixed. Our Ford Focus known faults page gives you the same material split by generation, tagged by engine, priced, badged by source, with the recalls in the same table and the confirmed service intervals underneath. And the archive can't do the thing that actually matters, which is check any of it against the specific car you're looking at.
How does this help with an actual advert?
Here's the honest starting point: on provenance records we get the same data as everybody else. Outstanding finance comes from the lenders, theft markers from the police, write-off records from the insurance industry, and every check in the country draws on the same registers. Nobody has a private source, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling.
What's different is what we put in alongside them. Three inputs no plate-lookup service takes: the advert text itself, which isn't data anybody files anywhere; the full DVSA MOT advisory history rather than just pass and fail; and this fault database, matched to the exact model, engine and year in the listing. A plate lookup has never read a single word a seller wrote.
The Smart Check is the tier built on that. Every finding gets explained rather than just the biggest one, the model's known faults come with their repair costs attached, and you get the questions to ask this particular seller plus a negotiation position based on what the car is likely to need. So instead of reading that Qashqai CVTs fail and wondering, you get told that this advert is a 2011 Qashqai with the Xtronic box, that the MOT history shows a gap where the transmission work would have been, and what to ask about it. Facts mean something different together than they do apart, and putting them together is the actual job.
What it can't do is see unrecorded accident damage or judge the quality of a repair. Neither of those is in any database at any price, ours or anyone else's, which is why none of this replaces looking at the car and driving it.
So if you're sat looking at a listing right now, the thing to do is run the free scan on it. It reads the advert against the MOT history and this fault database and hands back a verdict, a risk score and the single biggest thing it found, with no card and no password. If it turns something up worth digging into, the free report upgrades on the same link afterwards without re-running anything, so nothing's wasted if the answer is walk away.
The short version
Good & Bad wasn't migrated when Honest John closed, it was retired. The archived pages are still readable through the Wayback Machine, and the fault information is rebuilt free on our common problems pages: 593 records added, 824 in the database, 736 live across 41 makes and 126 models, each one pinned to a generation and an engine and badged with where it came from. Owner reports are reports rather than proof, and they're marked as such. Take the rows that match the advert in front of you, check them against the MOT history, and ask the seller about them by name.
