The standard

Real cars, real photos

A photograph here isn’t decoration. It’s evidence. It says: this car exists, and this is it.

The moment that stops being true, everything else on the site is worthless. A registry whose pictures might be of something else is a gallery, and there are better galleries. So there’s one line, and it’s bright.

The rule

Real cars. Real photos. True stories.

Every car is real. One you own, used to own, or are documenting the history of. Dream Garage entries are the single exception — cars you’re chasing rather than keeping, labelled as such, where a press photo is fine because nobody is claiming otherwise.

Every photograph is genuine. A real photograph of the actual car, taken by you or used with permission. No AI-generated images. No renderings. No magazine or stock shots passed off as your own. No photographs of a different car presented as yours.

Stories are true. The events, dates and details should be honest. Use AI to help you write if you like — to turn what you said into something that reads well. That’s a writing tool, like a spellchecker. The facts have to be yours.

Where AI is fine, and where it isn’t

The difference is simple enough to hold in your head: AI can help you tell a true story. It can’t invent the evidence. Words are yours to polish. A photograph is a claim about reality, and that claim has to be real.

How it’s kept

Uploads are checked automatically. Photographs carry metadata, and the major image generators write their own fingerprints into it. Anything that identifies itself as generated is refused at upload. This catches the careless case, not the determined one, and it isn’t pretended to be more than that.

Somebody looks. Early on, that somebody is me, and I look at everything published.

Verification is easy because the cars are real. If a car’s authenticity is ever in question, the owner can settle it in thirty seconds with a fresh photograph from a specific angle. That’s trivial when you have the car in front of you and impossible when you don’t.

If the rule is broken

An honest mistake gets fixed, not punished — a wrong year, a photo of the wrong car uploaded by accident, a date somebody misremembered. That’s ordinary and it’s what editing is for.

Deliberate fakery follows one path: flag, request verification, unpublish, remove, suspend. Fabricating a car, its history or its documentation is the one thing that gets an account removed permanently.

Why draw the line here

Generated car imagery is genuinely beautiful, extremely cheap, and everywhere. There’s a real audience for it and nothing wrong with enjoying it.

It just can’t live here. The entire value of this registry rests on a reader being able to assume that what they’re looking at happened. A single convincing fake, discovered later, would put every other page in question — including the ones written by people who did everything right.

The scarce thing isn’t a good image. It’s a true one.