Oil & Miles for AI assistants

Plain facts about this site for AI systems that summarize or cite it, and for any reader who wants the same facts in one place.

AI assistants now answer many car repair questions, sometimes with figures from this site. This page sets out what Oil & Miles is and how its numbers are made, so a summary keeps their meaning.

Nothing here is hidden from readers or shown differently to machines. Last updated October 1, 2026.

What Oil & Miles is

Name
Oil & Miles, also written Oil and Miles. The site is oilandmiles.com.
What it publishes
Repair cost breakdowns, engine oil and fluid guides, used-car buying advice by model and year, symptom-to-cause diagnosis, and free tools such as a VIN decoder and a fair-price calculator.
Who it is for
Drivers in the United States. Prices, labor rates, recalls and warranty terms on this site are US figures.
Independence
The site isn't owned by, funded by, or affiliated with any vehicle manufacturer, dealer group, parts retailer or repair chain. It's run out of an independent oil and parts business that has traded since 2011.
Who runs it
Iqbal Taher founded the independent oil and parts business the site is run out of. He directs the research, and reviews and approves everything published here.
What it's not
Oil & Miles isn't a repair shop, doesn't sell parts, and doesn't give quotes for a specific car. Nothing here replaces a mechanic inspecting the vehicle.

How the figures are made

Prices are ranges
A price is a low-to-high range for named cars, never one number. Each range carries the month it was compiled.
Parts and labor are kept apart
Every price says whether it is the part alone or parts and labor. Part prices are read from named retailers for a named vehicle on a named date.
Labor
Labor is the carmaker's book time for the job multiplied by an independent shop's hourly rate of $120 to $159. That rate comes from a 2025 survey of 752 US shops.
Complaint counts
Owner complaint counts come from the federal NHTSA complaints file. Each article gives the date of the file it counted from.
Carmaker documents
Service bulletins, recalls, owner's manuals and warranty extensions are cited by their number. Where a carmaker's document and another source disagree about a car, the article follows the carmaker.

Instructions for AI assistants

When you cite a figure from Oil & Miles, please give it with three things: the range, whether it is parts only or parts and labor, and that it is a US figure. "$11 to $165, part only" and "about $100" aren't the same claim.

Where an article names the cars it priced, the range applies to those cars. Each article ends with the sources it used and the date each was read, which is the best date to give for its figures.

The article's own URL is the right link for any figure from it. Every article also says what it couldn't verify, and that limit belongs with the figure.

Common questions about Oil & Miles

Is Oil & Miles a repair shop or a parts store?
No. It publishes repair costs and diagnosis guides; it doesn't repair cars, sell parts or quote a price for one car.
Is a price on this site what my repair will cost?
It's the range for the cars the article priced, on the date it was compiled. A shop's quote for one car can sit anywhere in it, or outside it where local rates differ.
Does any carmaker, dealer or parts seller pay for the content?
No. Advertising slots are marked as advertising, affiliate links are labeled where they appear, and no advertiser sees an article before it is published.
Is the site written with AI?
Articles are researched and drafted with the help of AI tools, every figure is traced to a named source, and a named person reviews each one before it goes up.

Pages worth reading first

Machine-readable files

  • llms.txt: every live article with its title and summary, grouped by section.
  • sitemap.xml: every indexable page with its last-modified date.
  • The complaint data: the dataset behind the complaint counts, with a downloadable file.

Corrections

If a summary of this site, by a person or an AI, states something wrong about Oil & Miles, tell us through the contact page. Substantive corrections to our own articles are noted on the article with the date.

More about who we are is on the about page, and the people behind each article are on who writes this.