Editorial policy

This page says how InAutoNews decides what to publish and what it refuses to. It is written to be checkable rather than reassuring: everything below is either a rule the software enforces, or a commitment you can hold us to by pointing at an article where we failed it.

It applies to every article, including short news items, sponsored pieces and articles restored at addresses this site used before 2018. Where a category is treated differently, this page says so.

What we cover

The car industry, for people who follow it closely. Manufacturer and model news, corporate and financial stories, powertrain and battery technology, the supply chain, UK and European regulation, and motorsport. We report what has happened and what companies have said, in that order of preference.

We are a trade and enthusiast news title, not a consumer buying service. We do not publish purchase advice, finance recommendations or valuations, and nothing here should be the only thing anyone relies on before spending money.

Sourcing

Every article is written from documents that were actually retrieved and read. There is no exception to this, and it is enforced rather than encouraged: a draft with no source attached to it cannot reach the publishing queue.

We prefer sources in roughly this order.

1. Primary documents. Regulatory filings, homologation and type approval records, court judgments, annual reports, published test data, the manufacturer's own technical release.
2. On the record statements. A named person saying something in a press conference, a filing, an interview or a written response to us.
3. Reporting by another publication, where we cannot get to the primary material ourselves. We name it, link to it, and say what it claims rather than restating it as though we had established it.

Where an article rests on published sources a reader can check, they are listed at the foot of it with the date we retrieved each one. A source that has since moved or gone offline is marked as such rather than quietly dropped.

A story that exists only inside one other publication's report gets attributed in the headline or the first sentence, not buried in the fourth paragraph. If we cannot stand it up ourselves, the reader is entitled to know whose word they are taking.

Unnamed sources and rumour

We would rather publish less. An unnamed source is used only where the information is of real public interest, where there is a credible reason the person cannot be named, and where an editor other than the writer knows who they are. The article says what kind of position the source holds and why they are not named.

Rumour is not reported as fact, and speculation is not laundered through a question mark in a headline. Where we write about something unconfirmed, the article says plainly that it is unconfirmed, says who is claiming it, and says what the company involved told us when we asked. If we did not ask, we say that as well.

Renders, mock ups and fan illustrations of unannounced cars are not evidence and are not presented as such. We do not run them as though they were leaked images.

Verification before publication

Before an article is published, every factual claim in it is checked back against the documents it was written from. Anything the check cannot support is put in front of an editor, and the article does not move until the editor has either found a source for it, softened it to what the evidence carries, or cut it.

A second person reads every article before it goes out. On a piece produced with any machine assistance, that reader is named at the foot of the article, and the system will not publish it without them.

Quotations and attribution

We do not invent quotations. Nothing on this site is inside quotation marks unless somebody said or wrote it, and our tooling is not permitted to compose a quotation under any circumstances.

Quotes are used in the sense the speaker meant. We tidy filler and false starts in spoken material and nothing else. Where a quote is translated, the article says so and names the original language. Where a quote is trimmed inside a sentence, the cut is marked. Where a quote comes from another publication's interview, that publication is credited in the same sentence.

Press material and embargoes

Press releases are a source, not an article. We read them, take the checkable facts out of them, and write our own piece. A release is never republished as editorial, and manufacturer marketing language is not adopted as our own: a car is not described here as segment defining because somebody's press office said it was.

We keep embargoes we have agreed to, and we do not agree to embargoes that come with conditions on what we may write. An embargo we never accepted does not bind us, and we will say so before publishing rather than after.

Sending us a press release does not create an obligation to cover it, and no amount of advertising spend does either.

Figures, specifications and prices

Every figure we publish comes from a document we can point at. Power, torque, range, emissions, prices and dates are taken from the manufacturer's own material or from the regulator, and the article says which, because the two often disagree.

Test cycles are named. A range figure means nothing without knowing whether it is WLTP, EPA or a manufacturer estimate, and we do not convert between them. Prices carry a currency, a market and a date, and we do not restate a 2013 price in today's money without saying that we have.

Where we are uncertain, the article says we are uncertain. We would rather print a range we can defend than a single number we cannot.

Why we publish no road test scores

We do not award marks out of ten, stars or verdicts to cars we have not driven, and at present we have not driven them. A score is a claim about first hand experience, and inventing one is the same category of failure as inventing a quote.

Where we write about how a car performs, we are reporting what tests and other publications found, and we say whose findings they are. If that changes, and staff here begin driving cars on manufacturer launches or in independent tests, this section will change with it and the terms of the loan will be disclosed on every piece that comes out of it.

Pictures

Photographs are used under a licence that permits it, credited to the photographer beneath the picture, and linked to the original file. Manufacturer press images are labelled as manufacturer images. Every picture on this site records where it came from and the terms it is used under, which is what makes a rights query quick to settle in either direction.

We do not alter the content of a news photograph. Cropping and exposure are fine. Adding or removing anything in the frame is not, and a picture that has been composited for illustrative purposes says so in its caption.

Where no usable photograph exists, an article may carry a drawn illustration instead. It is always labelled as an illustration, it carries no badges, registration plates or identifiable people, and it is never captioned as though it recorded an event. An illustration on a historical article is decoration, not evidence.

Machine assistance

Most of what you read here is written and edited by people on staff. Software helps with the parts of the job that are searching, fetching, sorting and checking, and some of those tools use language models. They do not decide what is worth covering, they do not choose the angle, and they cannot publish anything.

Where machine assistance contributed to the text of an article, the article says so and names the editor who approved it. The full account, including the list of things these tools are not permitted to do at all, is on the AI and automation page.

The rebuilt archive

InAutoNews published daily from 2008 to early 2018 under previous ownership, and then went dark for eight years. The present publisher bought the domain, not the copyright, so nothing here reproduces the original articles.

Where a historical address is brought back, the piece at it is newly written, says so at the top of the page, and carries the date the story originally ran rather than the date we wrote it. Those pieces are excluded from the news feed and the news sitemap. A rebuilt article is never presented as breaking news, and a 2012 event never carries a 2026 date.

Restored articles are held to the same standards as everything else. Age is not a reason to leave something wrong.

Independence and conflicts of interest

Editorial decisions are not for sale. Advertisers see no article before publication, choose nothing that we cover, and cannot have a piece altered or taken down because they dislike it.

Paid and partner content is labelled above the article, before the text begins, and its commercial links carry the attributes search engines expect. The detail is on the advertising page.

Staff do not accept payment, equipment or shareholdings from companies they cover. Where travel or accommodation for an event has been paid for by a manufacturer, the article says so. Where a writer has a personal interest in a company in a story, they do not write the story, and if the interest is unavoidable it is disclosed in the piece.

Updating, and requests to remove an article

A published article is a record. We correct it, and we say what we corrected, but we do not rewrite history quietly. How that works, and the difference between a typo and a correction, is on the corrections page.

Removing an article entirely is rare and needs a serious reason: a legal requirement, a real risk to someone's safety, or a piece that turns out to be wholly false and unfixable. Being unflattering is not one. Where an article is removed, the address returns a status saying it is gone rather than pretending it never existed.

Requests to remove personal information from an old article are considered seriously and answered individually. There is more about how we handle those on the privacy page.

Right of reply

If an article makes a significant criticism of a person or a company, we approach them for comment before publication where it is reasonably possible, and the article records whether they responded. Silence is reported as silence, not implied agreement.

Anyone who believes an article treats them unfairly can put that to us afterwards. Where the point is sound, it becomes a correction or an added statement in the piece itself.

Complaints

Send it through the contact page with the address of the article and what you say is wrong with it. An editor who did not work on the piece reviews the complaint.

We aim to acknowledge within two working days and to answer substantively within ten. If we agree with you, we fix it, mark it and say so on the article. If we disagree, we tell you why in plain terms. Disagreeing with an article's conclusions is not the same as identifying an error, and we will not pretend otherwise, but we will always answer.