About InAutoNews

InAutoNews reports on the car industry: the companies that build vehicles, the technology going into them, the rules they have to meet, and the racing that still sells a good deal of it. We write for people who follow the industry closely enough to notice when a press release is doing work that a fact should be doing.

The masthead is older than the current operation, and the story of how those two things came together is worth telling properly, because it explains most of the decisions on this site.

What we cover

Manufacturer news and model launches. Corporate stories: results, plant decisions, joint ventures, the slow reordering of who owns whom. Powertrain and battery technology, and the supply chain underneath it. European and UK regulation, type approval, emissions rules and the timetables attached to them. Motorsport, chiefly Formula 1, the World Rally Championship and endurance racing. Now and again the used and fleet markets, because that is where most people meet a car for the first time.

We do not cover lifestyle, celebrity ownership or the wider gadget beat. Other publications do those things properly and we are not one of them.

The first run, 2008 to 2018

The title published daily for a decade under previous ownership. Something in the order of forty thousand articles went out under it, mostly short industry news written fast, and a surprising amount of it stuck. Wikipedia cites this masthead in dozens of language editions. So do motoring titles in several countries, and a great many forum threads and reference pages that people are still finding through search.

None of that was planned. It is what happens when a title covers a beat every day for ten years: it becomes the page somebody links to when they need a date, a production figure or a quote from a launch nobody else bothered to write up.

Publication stopped in early 2018.

What happened while it was dark

The site stayed up for a while, then stopped being maintained, and at some point before the domain expired it was compromised. Somebody injected pharmacy spam pages into it and built a link network pointing at them. For a period, a reader following a ten year old citation from Wikipedia was landing on a masthead that had been turned into a doorway.

Then the registration lapsed and everything went at once. Around 288,000 addresses stopped resolving, including every article, every image and every one of those citations. The work was still there in the web archive, but as far as anybody following a link was concerned it had ceased to exist.

This is the ordinary end of a mid-sized trade title, and it is a genuine loss. The reporting does not become wrong when the company behind it stops paying a renewal fee. It just stops being reachable.

Why we took it on

We wanted to run a motoring news title. This one came up, and it came with two things nothing new can buy: a decade of daily coverage that people are still trying to reach, and a name the trade recognises.

It also came with an obvious job attached. Tens of thousands of live citations were pointing at nothing, and the last thing a reader saw at this address was somebody else's spam. Neither of those problems fixes itself, and the people who would otherwise benefit from a fix are the ones who linked here in good faith years ago.

The domain was acquired at auction in August 2026, and we have no connection to the original owners or staff. We are plain about that, because a relaunched masthead implying unbroken continuity misleads readers about who is answerable for what is on the page. This is a new publication, working under an old name, with a commitment to the archive that came with it.

Buying the domain bought the domain. It did not buy the copyright in anything published between 2008 and 2018, and nothing here reproduces that work.

The first thing we did

Not publish. The first months went on the inventory and the cleanup, and it is worth saying what that involved, because it is the part that separates rebuilding a publication from harvesting an expired domain.

• Cataloguing everything. All 288,045 addresses the site ever served were recorded before a single page was written, along with what each one held, how often it is still linked to from elsewhere, and how often somebody still tries to reach it.
• Killing the injected pages. Every spam page somebody put here was identified and now returns a status saying it is permanently gone, so no crawler and no reader is ever served one again.
• Disowning the link network. The domains that were built to point at those pages have been filed with Google as links we want nothing to do with. Inherited spam links are inherited liability, and leaving them in place to see whether they help would be the shortcut this site is not taking.
• Staying out of the index. Search engines were kept out deliberately while the site was thin. Inviting Google to a handful of placeholder pages teaches it that this domain is worth very little, and that assessment costs far more to undo than to avoid.

None of that produced a single reader. It is the reason the site can be trusted with the archive now.

How the archive is being rebuilt

Work is ordered by that inventory rather than by date. An article from 2012 that four other publications still cite is restored before an article from 2017 nobody has linked to since it ran. The archive therefore comes back looking haphazard for a while, and the pages readers actually try to reach come back first.

Where a historical address is brought back, the piece at it is newly written by us from sources we can name. It carries a notice at the top saying so, and it is dated to when the story happened rather than to when we wrote about it. A 2013 motor show report does not get a 2026 dateline, and it never appears anywhere on this site presented as news.

The rest of the inventory is dealt with honestly as well. An address that held something we have no intention of restoring returns a status code saying it is gone, rather than a stub or a redirect to the front page. Sending every dead link to the homepage is the cheapest option available and the most misleading, and it is the single clearest sign that somebody bought a domain for its history rather than for what it published.

What we are not doing with it

A ten year old masthead with inherited authority can be monetised in about a week if nobody minds what happens to it. So it is worth writing down what will not happen here, in terms specific enough to be caught breaking.

• No links are for sale on this site. Not in articles, not in the archive, not quietly.
• No historical address will be repurposed to hold content that has nothing to do with what was there.
• No dead URL is redirected to the homepage or to a commercial page to make use of its links.
• No article is published to a category the archive never covered because a keyword tool suggested it.
• Nothing here is written to be sold on. This is a publication, run to keep publishing.

How the journalism is made

Articles here are written and edited in house. A person decides what is worth covering, reads the primary material, writes the piece and puts their name on it, and a second person reads it before it goes out. That is the whole of the process, and it is the part we are not willing to shorten.

Software supports that work. It watches for filings and manufacturer releases, fetches the documents an editor asks for, keeps track of which sources a draft is leaning on, and flags any statement in a draft that those documents do not actually support. Some of those tools use language models. They are useful for the same reasons a good research assistant is useful, and they are held to the same limit: they prepare material and check work, they do not decide what is true, and they do not publish.

Where any part of a piece was drafted with machine assistance, the article says so and names the editor who read and approved it. The system refuses to publish such an article without an approver recorded against it. Our policy on AI and automation sets out where the line falls and what these tools are forbidden from doing.

Two rules sit above the rest. We do not invent quotations, and nothing on this site is attributed to a person who did not say it. We do not publish road test scores, because we have not driven the car.

Who writes here

Every article carries a byline, and every byline leads to a page saying who that person is and what they cover. The full list is on the masthead. Where a piece was produced with machine assistance, the editor who approved it is named at the foot of it too.

If you wrote for InAutoNews during its original run, we would like to hear from you: to have your byline recorded on your own work, to have it kept off ours, or simply to tell us what we have got wrong about the period. You were there and we were not, which makes you a better source than the archived pages we are working from.

How this is paid for

Advertising, and in time affiliate arrangements. Neither buys editorial influence, and both are labelled where they appear. The rules we hold ourselves to are on the advertising page, including the ones about what we refuse.

There is a mailing list as well. It exists because search traffic belongs to search engines and an email list belongs to us, and it runs on double opt in with a one click unsubscribe. What we store, and for how long, is on the privacy page.

Standards, and getting it wrong

Our editorial policy sets out how we source and verify, what we do with press material, and where our conflicts of interest lie. The corrections policy explains how to report an error and what happens to it once you have.

Corrections are published on the article they belong to, with a date and a note saying what changed. We do not quietly edit a page and leave no trace, because the version somebody already read is the version they will remember.

Reaching us

Corrections, tips, rights enquiries and complaints all go through the contact page, which says what to include so the right person picks it up. If you linked to this site years ago and the address you used still does not work, that is exactly the message we want.

Two automated agents run from this project and both identify themselves in their User-Agent string. InAutoNews-Restoration fetches archived copies of this domain's own pages. InAutoNews-LinkCheck fetches pages that cite us, to see whether the citation is still there. Both are rate limited to roughly one request a second, both respect robots.txt, and if either is a nuisance we will stop it on request.