MotorCaliber is an independent car-safety reference. We take the crash-test, recall, and complaint data the US government publishes, compute one transparent safety score from it, and rank cars so a shopper can compare measured safety instead of marketing.
01Who runs MotorCaliber
MotorCaliber is produced by the MotorCaliber Safety Desk, a small editorial team that compiles federal NHTSA data into one honest, versioned safety score. The desk is led by our editor, Ivanna Verstliar, who is accountable for the site's editorial standards, the accuracy of what we publish, and how corrections are handled. We are a data and editorial operation, not a group of automotive engineers: our authority comes from the federal NHTSA record and a fully published method, not from personal opinion. We are not affiliated with NHTSA, the US government, or any automaker.
02Why we exist
NHTSA publishes excellent data, but it lives across four separate tools: crash-test ratings in one place, recalls in another, complaints in a third, investigations in a fourth. Nobody joins them into a single honest picture of one car. That is what every MotorCaliber page does.
03How we build each page
Every scorecard is assembled from one vehicle's exact federal records. We pull its crash-test stars from the NHTSA NCAP ratings, its recall campaigns from the NHTSA recalls database, and its owner complaints from the NHTSA complaints database, keyed to that vehicle's NHTSA VehicleId. We compute the NHTSA Safety Index with a public formula (Methodology version 1.0) and write the plain-language read from those exact figures. Every page is then checked against a fixed honesty standard before it publishes: no invented ratings or stars, no reliability or ownership-cost claims the data cannot support, no fabricated quotes, and clear labeling of unverified complaints. The full standard is on our editorial standards page.
04How we stay independent
MotorCaliber is funded by advertising, including Google AdSense. Advertising never influences a score. Scores are computed by a published formula from federal data, and no manufacturer can pay to change one. Ads are separated from editorial content and from the scores themselves.
05What we measure, and what we do not
We measure crash-test safety, recall history, and complaint severity. We do not measure reliability, repair cost, dependability, or resale, because the underlying federal data does not support those claims. When a car has not been crash-tested, we say so plainly rather than guessing, and it receives a recall-and-complaint Safety Record page instead of a score.
06Corrections and accountability
If a rating, recall, or complaint figure looks wrong, tell us the vehicle and what you believe is incorrect at hello@motorcaliber.com. We verify against the live NHTSA record, correct promptly, and log material corrections with dates on our corrections page. Our scoring method is versioned, so any change to how the Index is computed is dated and recorded.
07How to reach us
Email the Safety Desk at hello@motorcaliber.com. For the authoritative check of whether a specific vehicle has an open recall, use the NHTSA VIN lookup at nhtsa.gov/recalls.