Sources & Editorial Standards

Public data sources

• DVLA Vehicle Enquiry Service — UK registration → factory spec (make, model, colour, first-registered, MOT due, tax status, emission class, CO₂, fuel type). Open Government Licence. Integrated at our Worker API, surfacing in the app's reg-lookup flow.
• DVSA MOT History API — per-registration MOT history including mileage at each test, advisories, and failures. Open Government Licence. Integrated at our Worker API; frontend integration in progress.
• gov.uk/check-vehicle-recall — authoritative UK recall lookup. We prompt users to verify recalls with the VIN rather than claiming completion status ourselves.
• Wikipedia engine pages — BMW_N47, BMW_B47, BMW_N57, BMW_B57, BMW_B58, BMW_S55. CC-BY-SA, cited for historical specification context.
• BMW press archives — manufacturer spec sheets, UK launch press, BMW Technology Office technical articles. Used for chassis × engine mapping and authoritative emissions/ULEZ classifications.
• UK trade press — Autocar, Car Magazine, What Car, PistonHeads Test Drives. Used for launch-year fact-checking and market-context.

Failure-pattern sources

• DVSA advisory aggregates — rolled-up MOT advisory data by engine/chassis cohort, sense-checked against forum consensus.
• Independent BMW specialist maintenance schedules — typically more cautious than BMW's factory schedule (especially oil intervals). Drawn from BMW CCA's technical library and independent UK specialist publications.
• Forum consensus threads: Bimmer Post (F30 320d, F10 520d, F25 X3 20d, M140i, M3 F80), Bimmerfest, PistonHeads BMW sections. We reference forum consensus when validating failure patterns; we do not copy user content into our database.
• Recall database cross-reference — DVSA recall records (UK) and NHTSA (US) cross-referenced for shared failure modes across markets.

What we don't use

• AI content farms — bimmerboom.com, similar sites generating machine-written BMW "guides" at scale. Using them compounds errors.
• Competitor-scraped content — we don't ingest HPI Check reports, Carfax content, or any paid-vendor data we don't have rights to.
• Fake or fabricated user reviews — if we publish testimonials, they'll be real.
• LLM general knowledge for factual claims about engines — we've tested this and it hallucinates engine codes confidently. All our engine-level facts come from the structured reference tables, not the model.

Correction handling

Spot an error? Email hello@bimmer.ai with:

• The page URL
• The specific claim that's wrong
• A source or reasoning for the correction

We review corrections within 7 days and publish visible update notes with the date. No contact ignored — we'd rather ship a correction than leave a stale page live.