Our Editorial Standards

What we cover

Car and Problems publishes plain-English summaries of the publicly available safety record for every vehicle sold in the United States — recall campaigns, manufacturer service bulletins, owner complaints filed with the federal regulator, and preliminary investigations. Our beat is consumer safety: what is wrong with a vehicle, why it matters, and what an owner should do about it.

Sourcing

Every article on the site is produced from a primary source. For recalls, that is the federal recall campaign filing. For service bulletins, the manufacturer-issued dealer notice. For complaints, the verbatim federal owner narrative. For manufacturer news, the press release issued by the OEM's media relations desk. We do not republish from competing publications, aggregators, or scraped feeds.

Numerical facts — campaign IDs, affected-vehicle counts, model years, production-date ranges, dealer-notice document IDs — are read directly from the source filing by deterministic code, so the figures rendered on the article match the filing exactly. Critical safety advisories such as "do not drive" or "park outside" flags are parsed as structured fields and surfaced prominently on every page that references the recall.

How articles are produced

Each article goes through an editorial workflow before it is published:

1. Source ingestion: The original federal filing or manufacturer document is pulled from the official feed and stored verbatim in our database.
2. Drafting: A summary is drafted from the source document by our content pipeline, which is structured so that numerical and safety-critical fields cannot be rewritten or omitted.
3. Quality validation:An automated quality check rejects drafts that fall below the minimum length, contain marketing or PR vocabulary that does not belong in consumer-safety reporting ("commitment", "vision", "journey", "mission", "landmark", and similar), or fail to attribute the source. Failed drafts are regenerated.
4. Editorial review:Articles are tagged to the senior editor responsible for the relevant desk — Recalls & Investigations, Service Bulletins & Owner Complaints, or the Managing Editor for manufacturer news. The editorial team reviews flagged articles and audits a rolling sample across desks to catch issues the automated checks would miss.

Independence

Car and Problems is independent. We do not accept paid placement, sponsored content, or any form of editorial influence from manufacturers, dealers, parts suppliers, or commercial partners. Third-party advertising may appear on the site, but advertisers have no access to or influence over editorial content. We do not sell vehicles, host affiliate offers tied to manufacturer recall campaigns, or accept payment to suppress safety reporting.

Corrections policy

If you find a factual error — a misattributed model year, a wrong recall remedy, an incorrect affected-vehicle count, or a broken source link — please write to us with the citation you are working from. We acknowledge correction requests within one business day, verify against the primary source, and publish a dated correction note at the foot of the affected article within 48 hours. Substantial corrections are surfaced on the article itself so readers know what changed and why.

What we do not do

• We do not omit safety advisories. If a federal campaign carries a "do not drive" or "park outside" advisory, the flag is rendered prominently on every page that surfaces the recall — there is no editorial discretion to soften it.
• We do not republish content from competing automotive publications, aggregators, or scraping pipelines.
• We do not accept payment, gift, sponsored placement, or favours from manufacturers, dealers, suppliers, or any commercial party in exchange for editorial coverage or for softening the language used in a safety article.

Contact

For corrections, source-attribution questions, or to reach a specific editor about an article they signed off on, the contact page lists the editorial inbox and the senior editor for each desk.