MotorCaliber publishes car-safety information that people use to make real decisions. These are the standards the MotorCaliber Safety Desk holds every page to, maintained by our editor, Ivanna Verstliar.
01What we publish, and what we will not
- We measure safety, never reliability. We never present reliability, dependability, durability, repair cost, or resale as something we rate, because federal safety data does not support those claims.
- We never invent a rating. A vehicle NHTSA has not crash-tested gets no Safety Index and no stars. It receives a recall-and-complaint Safety Record instead.
- We never fabricate a quote or attribute a claim to an outlet we did not read. Where we point to outside reviews, we link to a real search, not a made-up citation.
- We publish only NHTSA data. We do not host IIHS ratings and never present a figure we do not have.
- Owner complaints are unverified consumer allegations. We label them as reported or alleged, and complaint volume never changes a score, only complaint severity does.
02Sourcing
Every figure comes from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and is public domain. Each scorecard names the vehicle's NHTSA VehicleId and links to the authoritative NHTSA VIN recall lookup. Our full endpoint list and refresh cadence are on the data sources page.
03How editorial is produced and reviewed
Each vehicle's plain-language summary is generated from that vehicle's exact NHTSA figures and then reviewed against this standard by the Safety Desk before it publishes. We disclose this because being transparent about how content is made is part of earning trust. Automated checks reject any draft that states a rating not in the vehicle's data, uses reliability language, or bakes in a date that would go stale, and the editor is accountable for the result.
04Corrections
We fix errors quickly and log material corrections with dates. Report anything that looks wrong to hello@motorcaliber.com. See the corrections log.
05Independence
MotorCaliber is advertising-funded. Advertising never influences a score, and no automaker can pay to change a rating. We are not affiliated with NHTSA, the US government, or any manufacturer.
Editorial standards maintained by Ivanna Verstliar, Editor. Version 1.0. Last revised 2026-06-20.