Using our diagrams and drawings
Short version: the drawings are ours and you may republish them with credit and a link. The photographs aren't ours to give away.
The diagrams, charts and line drawings
Every diagram, chart and drawing on this site was made here, from scratch, by a generator we wrote. Nothing was bought from a stock library and nothing was traced from someone else's work. That means we can give you permission to use them, which isn't true of most illustrations you'll find on a car site.
You may republish any diagram, chart or line drawing from this site, in an article, a forum post, a video or a presentation, on one condition: credit Oil & Miles and link to the page you took it from. A plain text credit with a working link is enough. You don't need to ask first, and there's no fee.
Formally, that's the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license, CC BY 4.0, and it applies to every diagram, chart and line drawing here from September 5, 2026. The credit we ask for is one line: Diagram: Oil & Miles, CC BY 4.0, with the link pointing at the article the image came from. Under each drawing there is a small "Use this image" box with that line and an embed snippet ready to copy.
The line drawings are the simplest case, because there's nothing in them that isn't ours. A timing belt drive, a pair of dashboard lamps, four dipstick readings, a cooling circuit, a brake rotor in section: fifteen of them as this is written, and every one computed from geometry rather than traced from a photograph, so no photographer, stock library or third party has a claim on any part of it. They're drawn to follow the reader's light or dark theme, which is why they sit inside the page rather than in a file of their own. If you want one as a standalone image, ask and we will send you an SVG; re-drawing it from a screenshot will only give you a worse copy.
What a credit looks like: “Diagram: Oil & Miles” with the words linked to the article it appears in. For a line drawing, “Drawing: Oil & Miles,” linked the same way. The diagrams and charts carry that credit under them on the page; the line drawings don't, because they have no caption, so this is the wording to use. If you're embedding rather than re-hosting, the file URLs are stable and won't be moved.
Two things we would rather you didn't do, though neither is a legal demand: passing the drawings off as your own, and editing the numbers inside them. If a figure in one of our diagrams is wrong, tell us and we will fix it at the source, which helps more people than a corrected copy on one other site.
The photographs are a different matter
The photographs aren't ours. They're licensed from Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons terms, and each one names its photographer under the image. We're allowed to use them here; we are not allowed to hand that right on to you.
If you want to use a photograph you saw here, go to Commons, find the original, and follow the license it carries. Most are CC BY or CC BY-SA, which means you may use them too. You simply have to credit the photographer rather than us.
Two diagrams are built on a photograph rather than beside one: an engine bay with the coolant parts numbered on it, and a dipstick handle marked in the same way. In those, the markings are ours and the photograph underneath isn't. The credit under the figure names both. Reuse the markings under the terms above and treat the photograph as the photographer's, exactly as we do.
Diagrams used to carry a photograph behind their header band as well. That was dropped on 28 August 2026 and no diagram carries one now, so a copy you took before that date may hold a photograph that the current version doesn't.
The complaint figures
Several charts count owner complaints filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. That database is a public federal record and belongs to nobody. You can query it yourself, and we link to the API on the pages that use it.
What is ours is the work on top: which model-years were pulled, how duplicates across scans were removed so the same car isn't counted twice, and how the ratios were formed. Reuse the resulting figures freely, with a link, and please say which date they were taken, because complaint counts grow, so a figure without a date is a figure that will quietly stop being true.
The writing
The articles themselves are ordinary copyright. Quote a sentence or two with attribution and a link, as you would any publication. Republishing a whole article isn't permitted, and it would not do you any good either. Two identical pages compete with each other and neither wins.
If you want to ask about something else
Translations, print use, or anything this page doesn't cover: write to us through the contact page. The answer is usually yes.
This page describes permissions we grant, not legal advice. Where a photograph's own license and this page disagree, the photograph's license wins.