About
About The Model Year
A record of the car industry, kept from the documents themselves: what an official body or a manufacturer published, quoted, dated, and tied to the market it applies to.
What this publication is
The Model Year reports and explains the paper trail of the car business: recall campaigns, safety ratings, registration and sales releases, regulatory filings and rulemakings, official price and specification changes, and the companies behind them. It is written in English for readers anywhere, and it treats no single country as the default: every price, rule, rating, warranty term and figure names the market it belongs to, and every range or consumption number names its test cycle, because the same car carries different figures under WLTP, EPA and CLTC.
The sections are the wire — the daily record — and five standing ones:
- China. The Chinese industry as it reaches the rest of the world: which brands are sold where, under which importer, with which warranty and at which official price.
- How it works. Technology and terminology explained from the body that defines it: cells and chemistries, platforms, charging, drivetrains, assistance levels, and what a line on a spec sheet means.
- Rules & rights. Regulation and consumer rights by jurisdiction: type approval, tariffs and duties, connected-vehicle and data rules, emissions standards, recall obligations and warranty law.
- Files. Standing reference on a model, a brand or a group: what it is, who owns it, where it is sold and what the official figures are. Updated, not republished.
- History. Documented history from archives, company heritage material, museum and society collections, and the regulatory and patent record.
How materials are made
Every material starts from a question or an event and is researched against primary pages: the regulator's document, the manufacturer's own statement, the trade body's release, the rating body's result. Those pages are fetched and read, and the passages that support the text are kept with it as quotations. A draft is written from that evidence, then checked against it: a claim that no quoted passage supports is removed or the material is not published. Sources are listed at the end of every material with links to the pages they came from.
A lead may come from anywhere — a feed, another publication, an aggregator. Evidence may not. When only a secondary account of something exists, the material says so and attributes it, or it is not published. Figures are never estimated, converted between markets, or carried over from a different one; where an official figure does not exist, the material says that instead.
Materials are published under the byline of the editors. They are not signed with invented names, and this publication has no testers, no press cars and no test track: it does not drive, measure, time, charge or service cars, and it says so wherever a reader might assume otherwise.
What this publication does not do
- No reviews, road tests or driving impressions.
- No reliability verdicts and no "best of" rankings that rest on our own judgement. Comparison tables sort published official figures by one named criterion and name no winner.
- No rumours, no speculation about unannounced products, no renders presented as news.
- No affiliate links, no deals, no sponsored placements. Nothing on this site is paid for by a manufacturer, an importer or a dealer.
- No judgement of whether a brand or a country is good or bad.
Corrections
When a material changes materially after publication it carries the date it was updated, and it is listed on the corrections page. A withdrawn material keeps its address and says that it was withdrawn; nothing is quietly deleted. If something here is wrong, write to the editors and it will be checked against the source.
Pictures and video
Pictures are documentary photographs found on the web and credited to the page they came from, with a link. Every one of them is looked at before it is published — not judged by the words around it — and a picture that does not show what the material is about is dropped. Nothing is generated: a made-up picture of a real car, part or document has no place on a publication of record, so a material whose subject yields no honest picture goes out without one.
Some materials carry a video from YouTube. It is shown only when the channel that published it allows embedding, it is always credited to that channel, and it stays a still picture on this page until you open it yourself.