Who writes this, and how
Who runs ai.cars, how the reviews are researched and written, where AI comes into it, and how to get something corrected.
ai.cars is edited by Michael Barker, with a team of the most powerful AI tools available: research, drafting and comparison work is done with AI under human direction, and every judgement, verdict and correction is the editor’s. A site covering machine autonomy ought to be candid about its own — so this is how it’s made.
Who we are
ai.cars is independent. We are not owned by, funded by, or affiliated with any vehicle manufacturer, autonomy developer or supplier. We take no payment for reviews, we do not accept sponsored placements, and no company can buy a position in our rankings or our comparison tool. There are no affiliate links on this site: if we tell you a car is good value, we earn nothing whether you buy it or not.
We also do not attend press launches or accept manufacturer-funded travel, which means we are never in the position of assessing a vehicle whose maker paid for the trip.
How the reviews are made
Every vehicle review on this site is a desk review. We have not driven these vehicles. What we do instead is assemble the public record — manufacturer specifications and press releases, regulatory filings, safety-case documents, financial results and earnings calls, government and standards-body publications, and independent reporting from named outlets — and then assess what it adds up to.
That method has real limits and we would rather state them than have you discover them. We cannot tell you how a car rides, how its interior wears, or how its driver-assistance behaves in the specific mess of your commute. Where a road test is what you need, read one; we link to good ones.
What the method is good for is the thing this site exists to do: comparing what companies claim about autonomy against what they have actually shipped, and holding the two side by side across an entire industry at once. A road tester drives one car for a week. We can check whether the Level 3 system a maker announced in 2023 ever reached a customer — and, more often than the industry would like, find that it did not.
Vehicles and autonomy programmes reviewed so far. Every one carries its sources at the foot of the page, so you can check our reading of the record against the record itself.
Our use of AI
Our reviews are researched and drafted with the assistance of AI language models, under human editorial direction and review. We think you should know that, particularly on a site about artificial intelligence.
In practice it works like this. Research is gathered from primary and reported sources, with each claim traced to something citable. Drafting is AI-assisted. The editor sets the brief, checks the material, resolves contradictions in the record, decides the judgements and the verdicts, and is answerable for what publishes. Sources are listed on every review so that our reading is checkable rather than something you have to take on trust.
The failure mode of this method is confident-sounding error, and we take specific steps against it: figures are traced to a named source rather than to a model’s recollection; claims that research contradicts get corrected before publication rather than after; and where the record is genuinely unclear — a range figure measured to different standards, a valuation nobody has confirmed — we say so on the page instead of picking the tidier number.
We use AI because it is the only way one editor can cover this industry at this breadth. We disclose it because a site that writes about machine autonomy has no business being coy about its own.
Sources and figures
Every review ends with the sources it was built from, linked. Where figures come from different testing standards we label which — EPA, WLTP and CLTC range numbers are not interchangeable, and CLTC in particular reads optimistically. Prices in our comparison tool are converted to US dollars at rates stated on that page; treat them as indicative and check locally. Where a widely repeated number has never actually been confirmed by the company involved, we attribute it rather than assert it.
Images
Vehicle photography on this site is manufacturer press-kit material, credited to its source on each image. We do not present renders or illustrations as photographs; where an image is an illustration, the caption says so.
Corrections
We will get things wrong. This industry moves quickly, companies cancel programmes they announced weeks earlier, and the public record is sometimes contradictory.
If you find an error — a wrong figure, a superseded fact, a mischaracterised system — write to corrections@ai.cars and tell us what is wrong and, if you can, what the correct information is. We correct errors on the page itself rather than quietly replacing text, and significant corrections are noted where they happened.
Manufacturers are welcome to write to the same address. We will correct a factual error on your say-so and a source; we will not remove an unfavourable assessment because you dislike it.
What we do not do
- We do not take payment, hospitality or vehicles from the companies we cover.
- We do not run sponsored reviews, paid placements or affiliate links.
- We do not let any company preview a review before publication.
- We do not present AI-assisted work as though it were written any other way.