Our Editorial Standards

What we cover

Car and Problems publishes plain-English summaries of the publicly available safety record for vehicles 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.

Structured fields such as campaign IDs, model years and document IDs are stored from the source filing. Figures quoted in an article's prose are written by the language model, so verify them against the linked source. 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

Articles are produced by an automated pipeline. Most are published without a person reading them first:

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 large language model writes a plain-English summary from the source document. Language models can make mistakes, so the linked primary source always takes precedence over our summary.
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. Publication: A draft that passes these checks is published automatically and labelled as an automated summary. It is not individually reviewed by a person. Articles appear under the byline of founder Ahmet Topcu, who is editorially responsible for the site. The byline shows that responsibility; it does not mean he wrote or reviewed the individual article. We decide what to publish by rule: repair bulletins need a source document, and we publish a limited number each day.

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 or source-attribution questions, use the contact page.