Editorial Standards & Ethics
Last updated: August 2026.
The standard a claim has to clear
Nothing goes up because it sounds right. A factual claim has to be traceable to something we can point a reader at: a regulator’s recall notice, a bulletin with its number and revision, a workshop manual page, a named technician who will stand behind what they said, or a measurement one of us took. Where it rests on none of that, it is labelled a pattern, or it waits.
That rule came out of the DPF reports the site started with: owner reports are a lead, not a finding. Twenty emails about one symptom tell us where to look, not how common it is, so we say how many we have and where from. Market and build range go before anything else in a recall piece, since specifications and plate ratings differ market by market. That one is a scar. We once rewrote an urgent notice at speed without stating either, and readers abroad spent an evening checking a VIN against a campaign that never applied to them. Our fact-checking policy has the checks in order.
Sourcing: attribution, anonymity, and who gets quoted
Anything attributable is attributed. A regulator notice is named and dated, a bulletin carries its number and revision, and a person on the record gets their name, their job and enough about it to be weighed: how many of these engines they see in a week, dealership or independent shop, which market. If a figure came from a press release, another publication or an owners group, the piece says so and whether we checked it.
Some of what we most need would cost somebody their job. Technicians, warranty administrators and supplier staff tell us things they are not permitted to, and for them a name in print is a disciplinary meeting. We grant anonymity for that reason and say in the article why. The managing editor approves every unnamed source and a second editor knows who they are. Anonymity buys nothing else, and an unnamed defect report still needs documents or a second source.
Left alone, a site like this drifts to the same voices: press offices, the loudest forum posters, and owners of nearly-new vehicles in the markets where we live. So we read non-English regulator notices, chase owners at 300,000 kilometres as well as 30,000, and quote independent workshops, operators, drivers and women owners who never post online.
Independence, gifts, and the fact that we are not Isuzu
We buy the parts, tyres, fluids and tooling we write about, and we pay independent workshops like anybody else. No manufacturer-funded or dealer-funded travel and no launch trips. An unsolicited part is returned, paid for, or disclosed and kept for long-term testing, and a lent vehicle is disclosed with who lent it and who paid for the fuel. A financial stake in a manufacturer, parts brand or workshop we cover is declared in the piece, or somebody else writes it. Emissions rules and vehicle taxation are politics, so nobody here campaigns on transport policy while covering it.
Isuzu Owners Club is an independent, unofficial publication. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by or connected to Isuzu Motors Limited, its subsidiaries, its dealers or its distributors, and nobody there reads our copy first. The model names we write about all day, Isuzu, D-Max, MU-X, N-Series, are trademarks of their respective owners, and we use them the only way an independent publication covering these vehicles can: descriptively, to say which vehicle a piece is about. We claim no ownership of them and no permission from anyone to use them. “Isuzu”, “D-Max”, “MU-X” and the series names appear here descriptively, to identify which vehicle a piece is about, as any independent publication covering them must. Those marks belong to their respective owners and we claim none of them. Our purpose is to help owners maintain these vehicles and find each other, which is also the limit of our standing: nothing here is official guidance. Warranty questions, recall registration and warranty-affecting servicing belong with Isuzu or an authorised dealer, and where the manufacturer’s documentation disagrees with ours, theirs wins and ours gets corrected.
What the labels mean, and where the money stops
News is what happened with the sourcing shown. A review means we had the vehicle, part or tool, and says for how long, whose it was and what it cost. Analysis is our reasoning laid over evidence we show you, and it says so. Opinion is a signed argument, never dressed as a technical finding. Sponsored material is labelled in the headline area and on the index, styled so it cannot be mistaken for editorial, and written by the advertiser, not our news writers.
Buying advertising gets you the placement. Not a preview of coverage, not a veto, not advance warning of a recall story that touches you. Some money we refuse: emissions-defeat hardware, meaning delete pipes, blanking plates, AdBlue emulators and emissions-delete remaps, affiliate links inside repair instructions, and additive advertising beside the fault it claims to cure. That is revenue we do not have, and it is the only reason to take our technical pages seriously, so the arithmetic works out. The rest is on our advertise page and our ownership and funding page.
Telling people before we criticise them
If a piece will be hard on a manufacturer, dealer group, supplier, tuner or workshop, the specific claims go to them in writing first. Not a warning that something is coming. The assertions, the figures and the question we want answered, with a deadline: normally three working days, longer where an honest answer needs an engineer, shorter where owners are driving the vehicle meanwhile.
What comes back goes in, at length if it is substantive. Where a company declines or lets the deadline pass we say so and say what we asked, because a reader should be able to tell no answer from never asked. A reply arriving afterwards is added with a dated note under our corrections policy, and we do not trade a delay or a softer line for access.
Plagiarism and fabrication
Both end a working relationship here, and neither counts as carelessness. Copying another outlet’s reporting, lifting a manual paragraph as though we wrote it, or reusing an owner’s forum explanation without credit is theft of the work that matters here. Where somebody else got there first we say so and link to them.
Fabrication means inventing a quote, a source, a document or a measurement, and it is worse here than most places, because a reader may put a spanner on a vehicle because of our number. A contributor found to have fabricated anything is finished with us, everything they filed is re-checked, and the affected articles carry a note saying what happened.
Where we use AI, and where we do not
Four uses, written down rather than waited for. Machine translation gives us a first pass at notices and bulletins in Japanese, Thai and Spanish, after which a person reads the original and any quote is marked as translated. Recorded interviews are machine-transcribed and the transcript checked against the audio. We use ordinary spelling and grammar tools. And we sometimes have a model re-do our payload sums, then do them again by hand, because a model’s confidence is not evidence.
No article, review, news item or maintenance procedure here is written by a language model. No torque figure, capacity, clearance, interval or tow rating ever comes from one, because a plausible invented number in a technical instruction is the sort of error that hurts somebody. No AI-generated image runs as a photograph of a vehicle or a part. Any other use that shaped a piece is disclosed on it. A named person wrote every word and an editor signed it off, so we will not offer the excuse that software got it wrong.
Bylines, and who answers for a piece
Every article carries the name of the person who wrote it and, where it contains a technical claim, the editor who checked that claim. No house bylines, no pen names and no unsigned recall notices, because whoever assembled a notice from three national sources is who a reader may need to argue with. On these policy pages we name roles instead, since the rules should outlive whoever holds the job.
You reach any of us at one address, read and triaged by the editors: support@isuzuownersclub.com. A complaint about a piece is answered by an editor who did not write it, and our contact page explains how the mail gets sorted.
