Auto Manufacturers Editing and Proofreading Services

A recall notice tells an owner that their vehicle "may pose a safety risk under certain conditions" and to "contact your dealer to schedule service at your earliest convenience." It does not say what the actual failure is, what conditions actually trigger it, whether the vehicle is safe to drive in the meantime, or how long the repair will take. An owner reading this has no way to judge whether to park the car today or drive it to work tomorrow, because the one document written specifically to convey urgency has communicated none of the information urgency actually depends on.

We edit what auto manufacturers produce to communicate a recall or safety issue to owners — recall notices and safety communications, technical service bulletin explanations for owners and dealers, interim safe-driving guidance pending repair, remedy and parts availability updates, and the correspondence responding to an owner's question about a specific recall. Our editors work on the letter that has to convey exactly how urgent a defect actually is.

The specific risk and interim guidance is what a recall notice actually needs to state, and its failure is language vague enough to satisfy a disclosure requirement without telling an owner what to actually do before the repair happens. May pose a safety risk under certain conditions describes the fact of a recall, not the decision an owner needs to make today. We work through these so the actual defect and failure mode are described in terms an owner can understand, since "a wiring harness may degrade over time, increasing fire risk" tells an owner something concrete that "may pose a safety risk" does not; so the specific conditions that increase risk are named, given that a defect that manifests only in cold-start conditions or only after a specific mileage threshold calls for different owner behaviour than one that could occur at any time; so interim guidance is stated explicitly — safe to drive normally, avoid a specific use until repaired, do not drive until repaired — rather than left for the owner to infer from the tone of the letter, because owners genuinely need this instruction and a letter that omits it leaves them guessing with their own safety; so the remedy is described specifically, including expected repair time and whether parts are currently available, given that an owner deciding whether to arrange alternate transportation needs to know if the fix takes twenty minutes or three weeks; so a distinction is drawn plainly between a safety recall and a technical service bulletin, because owners who confuse a minor bulletin for an urgent recall or the reverse are being let down by unclear terminology either way; and so a dealer's response to an owner's specific question addresses that question directly, rather than repeating the notice's general language back to them. Notices written this way let an owner make an informed decision about their own safety today, not just eventually visit a dealer.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including technical data, safety information and customer correspondence. We are editors rather than automotive engineers, safety regulators or defect investigators, and we offer no view on the defect, its causes or its severity. What we can do is make sure the notice tells an owner what to actually do.