How competitive is MechEng at Imperial?

There don't seem to be any application statistics on the Imperial website and judging by the entrace requirements page, it seems that if an applicant is likely to achieve A*A*A or A*AAA then they will be invited to the admissions day and offered a place quite easily. Is the interview technical and discriminating? How does Imperial differentiate between the many applicants applying with perfect grades?

For some reason the statistics page seems to have disappeared from the website but you can still find the 2013-2014 statistics here. Unfortunately, it does seem to be pretty competitive, it has more applications per place than any other course (of course that's not a perfect measure of how competitive it is, but combined with a fairly high average entrance tariff it does suggest that it's pretty competitive).

I'm not sure how many people they interview or what the interviews are like. You might be able to ask some of the people who applied this year for their opinions.

Jesus christ, 8.5:1?! I wish I'd never asked!! Haha, thanks (for all your help with my several hundred questions for which you always seem to have the answers)

Do remember though that it's 8.5 applications per place, not applications per offer! So it's not quite as bad as it sounds.

Yes, I'm aware of that; UCL has 11 applicants per place for MechEng and I've learnt not to be too put off by that

One last question, what kind of grades would 570ish UCAS points equate to? (I'm aware that things such as music certificates and DofE play a role here so it may not be too scary). Also, does this average take into account things like general studies and the EPQ?

As far as I'm aware, that figure does take into account things like general studies and the EPQ. I honestly don't know what those grades translate into although, using an incredibly unscientific analysis, I vaguely recall the average grades for a Cambridge fresher being A*A*A*A which equates into 540 UCAS points, whereas the average entry tariff for Cambridge is 600 UCAS points, so an inflation of about 10%. If you roll that over to Imperial, that might indicate that the average grades of freshers for Mechanical Engineering are A*A*AA but obviously this is hugely speculative.

Don't worry about average UCAS tariff. It allows you to roughly compare the standards of entry for different courses when the differences are large but you can't really convert that into grades, particularly when as you point out, you can get lots of UCAS points for pretty meaningless things.