Data & sources

Primary sources

Wikidata

The bulk of the model catalog comes from Wikidata — every item that is an instance of (or subclass of) automobile model (Q3231690), capturing manufacturer, inception/dissolution year, country of origin, body style, Commons image and linked Wikipedia article. Wikidata content is released under CC0.

NHTSA vPIC

The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's vPIC API provides authoritative US-market data for vehicles 1981 and later. The data is U.S. federal public-domain and may be used freely.

EPA FuelEconomy.gov

Engine, fuel-type and fuel-economy figures for US-market models since 1984 come from the U.S. EPA's FuelEconomy.gov dataset, aggregated from its per-trim ratings to one summary per model. U.S. federal public-domain.

GOV.UK vehicle licensing (DVLA)

For UK-market coverage we use the DVLA vehicle licensing dataset (table VEH0124), published under the UK Open Government Licence v3.0. Its per-year counts of vehicles still licensed on UK roads drive the "still on UK roads" survival figures — these are snapshot survivor counts, not production or sales numbers.

Wikimedia Commons

Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons, released under various Creative Commons and public-domain licences. Each image links back to its Commons file page, where individual attribution is recorded.

Curated historical data

For pre-1920 marques, coachbuilders, and one-offs missing from Wikidata, we maintain a small hand-curated seed list in scripts/curated_seeds.py, drawing on standard reference works — Beverly Rae Kimes & Henry Austin Clark, The Standard Catalog of American Cars; G.N. Georgano, The Complete Encyclopedia of Motorcars.

every.autos editorial

A small number of the most significant models carry an every.autos editorial essay — original prose written by us, not excerpted from anywhere. These are held to the same no-fabrication standard as the data: every essay is backed by at least two independent cited sources, every factual claim is checked against those sources before publishing, and every number in the text must trace to a source or to a catalog field (a validator rejects any that doesn't). Essays are shown in a distinct dark panel labelled "every.autos editorial", with their sources listed inline. Confidence is stated on each. Spotted an error? Every claim links its sources — corrections ship with the source that proves them.

Licensing & attribution

Wikipedia text (model backgrounds, brand histories, and country industry summaries) is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Every place we show it carries a per-item credit naming the source article and linking the licence; our own editorial prose is kept textually separate and is never blended with it.

Wikidata is CC0. NHTSA vPIC and EPA FuelEconomy.gov are U.S. federal public domain. DVLA / GOV.UK data is used under the Open Government Licence v3.0, shown wherever those figures appear. Wikimedia Commons images link back to their file pages, where per-image licence and attribution are recorded.

Roadmap

Planned additions include FIA racing homologation records and European type-approval databases. The catalog will eventually move to a hosted database to enable live queries and contributor edits.