Editorial Standards

Last reviewed: 24 July 2026

Car advice is consequential. Someone reads a page here and decides whether to drive to work or call a tow truck. This page sets out how that content is produced, so you can judge whether to trust it.

Where the facts come from

Recall, complaint and investigation data comes from NHTSA, the US Department of Transportation's safety agency. It is public domain, it is cited on every page that uses it, and the retrieval date is shown. We do not re-score, re-rank or editorialise those numbers into a proprietary rating.

Fault code meanings follow the SAE J2012 standard definitions for generic OBD-II codes. Where a code's practical cause differs from its literal definition, we say so and explain why.

Repair cost ranges are broad ballparks for US independent shops covering parts and labour together. They are deliberately wide. A single precise national figure would be a false precision, and the purpose of the range is only to tell you when a quote is far enough outside normal to be worth a second opinion.

What we will not do is invent a number. If we cannot source a figure, the page says so rather than carrying a confident-sounding estimate.

How safety verdicts are decided

Every symptom resolves to one of three verdicts: stop driving, fix it soon, or schedule it. That verdict is produced by fixed rules written in advance — deterministic pattern matching, not a judgement call and not a language model.

Where AI is used to add commentary tailored to what you typed, it operates under a hard constraint enforced in code: it can raise a severity level and can never lower one. If the rules say a flashing check engine light means stop, no model output can soften that. Every answer names its own source, so you can always see whether a model or the built-in guide produced it.

This is the single most important design decision on the site, and it is why the safety content behaves predictably rather than creatively.

What we refuse to publish

Step-by-step instructions for brake, airbag, fuel system, spring or high-voltage hybrid work. These can kill the person doing them or someone behind them, and no amount of traffic justifies publishing them.

Anything that helps defeat emissions equipment, disable a safety system, or roll back an odometer.

Invented credentials. We would rather show you no byline than a fabricated certification, and we will not manufacture expertise we do not have.

Pages for vehicles that do not exist. An earlier version of this site generated a page for every make, model and year combination without checking whether the car was ever built. Those pages are gone, and the generator now validates model years before publishing anything.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, it gets fixed, and corrections are the highest-priority mail we receive. Email hello@carfailure.com with the page URL and what is incorrect.

Substantive corrections are noted on the page itself rather than quietly edited away. Every page shows when it was last reviewed.

Commercial relationships

The site carries advertising and affiliate links, both disclosed in full on the affiliate disclosure page. Product links appear only on pages where a reader is plausibly shopping — buying guides and a small number of symptom pages where a tool is genuinely part of the answer. They are not attached to every page.

No shop, manufacturer, parts supplier or advertiser has ever paid to influence a verdict, a cost estimate or a recommendation, and we do not accept that arrangement. Where a $25 tool is enough, the site says so instead of steering you to a $350 one.