Editorial Policy

MotorJury publishes two kinds of page, and this policy says how each is made, who is responsible for it, and what happens when it is wrong.

Computed pages

Model-year verdicts, model overviews, rankings and comparisons are generated from public records — NHTSA owner complaints and recall campaigns, and EPA fuel-economy data — by a published formula. No person writes or adjusts an individual verdict, and no advertiser, dealer or manufacturer can buy one. The formula is on the methodology page; the source records are linked from every page. Because the data is federal and the formula is fixed, two people running the same build get the same score.

A computed page is published only when the record behind it is deep enough to mean something. A model year with fewer than thirty complaints does not get its own page, and a verdict built on fewer than fifty is labelled thin evidence. Pages that do not meet the bar for search indexing — catalogue entries with no photograph or sourced specification, translated copies, head-to-head pages — remain available to readers but are marked so search engines do not index them.

Written pages

Buyer's guides, car biographies, editor's notes on model pages, and the introductions to each section are written and edited by Adir Trabelsi, and carry his name and the date of the last revision. Pages without a human byline — the model-year verdicts, the ownership indexes, the catalogue entries — are produced by the build from the public record and carry an attribution line naming the sources and the method instead of an author, because no person wrote them. They draw on the same federal record as the computed pages, on manufacturers' published recall and warranty actions, and on court filings where a defect has been litigated. They do not draw on anonymous forum posts, and they are not generated by a language model and published unread. Where a written page makes a factual claim about a specific model year, that claim can be checked against the model page it links to.

Corrections

Errors are corrected in the data or the formula, not by editing one page, so a fix reaches every affected page on the next nightly build. Send corrections to corrections@motorjury.com with the page address and what you believe the right figure is. Corrections are answered before any other mail. Written pages that are materially revised carry a new revision date.

Advertising and affiliates

The site is funded by advertising and disclosed affiliate links. Verdicts are computed before any advertisement is attached to a page, advertising placements are never sold against a specific verdict, and affiliate links are disclosed on the disclosure page. Sponsored content, if it is ever published, will be labelled as such on the page itself.

Sources and licensing

Complaint and recall data: NHTSA, public domain. Fuel economy: EPA, public domain. Catalogue data: Wikidata, CC0. Photographs: Wikimedia Commons, under the licence stated on each file, credited per image. Specification excerpts: Wikipedia, CC BY-SA, attributed on the page. MotorJury's own scores and written text may be quoted with a link to the page.

Contact

Editor: Adir Trabelsi · contact page · about MotorJury.