About eli5cars
Car problems explained like you're 5.
Who's behind eli5cars
eli5cars is founded and built by Puya Rahmanian, an independent builder of consumer-first web tools. I'm not a mechanic and eli5cars is not a repair shop — I'm a builder who got tired of opaque repair pricing and vague advice, and built the resource I wished existed the next time my own car started making a noise I couldn't explain.
That's the honest framing: no ASE certification, no shop background, no mechanic's degree behind this site. What eli5cars offers instead is a structured, data-driven way to translate real vehicle data and real-world repair patterns into plain English, so you know what questions to ask and what a fair price looks like before you talk to a professional.
How our pages are made (methodology)
Every page on eli5cars follows the same production process, so the site is consistent and checkable rather than a pile of one-off blog posts:
- Vehicle data — year, make, model, trim, and engine details are decoded directly from the NHTSA vPIC database, the same public federal data source behind the U.S. vehicle recall lookup. We don't guess at trim or engine specs.
- Repair costs come from curated cost tables that are reviewed and dated by hand — DIY part cost versus typical shop price, shown as ranges rather than single misleading numbers, because real prices vary by region and vehicle.
- Suspect causes are ranked by real-world frequency — the cause most likely to actually be wrong with your car comes first, not the one that's most dramatic or most profitable to fix.
- A quality gate before publishing — every page must have at least two ranked suspects, each with a specific driveway test and a cost range, plus a matched video, before it is submitted to search engines. Pages that don't clear that bar stay unpublished rather than go out half-finished.
AI is used to translate structured data into plain English — turning a cost table and a ranked list of suspects into a clear explanation. The facts themselves come from the data sources above, never from the model's own invention.
Corrections policy
If something on eli5cars is wrong — a cost that's out of date, a suspect that's ranked incorrectly, a fact that doesn't hold up — email us through the contact page. Corrections are reviewed, and pages carry review dates so you can see when a page was last checked.
Our promise (consumer-first)
- Free scan first. We always point you to the free OBD2 scan at AutoZone, O'Reilly, or Advance Auto Parts before you spend a dollar anywhere else.
- No scare tactics. We rank causes by how likely they actually are, not by which one sounds the scariest or costs the most to fix.
- Safety-critical systems always get a "see a professional" guidance. Brakes, steering, and suspension pages carry a mandatory warning to get a physical inspection before driving, no matter how minor the symptom seems.
Sister site disclosure
eli5cars is built by the same maker as AlloyHaus, a fitment-first wheel marketplace. When we link to AlloyHaus on vehicle pages, that's why — we say so wherever we do.
How we stay free
eli5cars is free to use and has no paywalls. We may earn a small commission through the Amazon Associates program if you purchase a product through a link on our site. We may also display advertising in the future. Our editorial content is not influenced by these commercial relationships — we link to parts and tools we believe are relevant to the repair discussed, not whatever pays the highest commission.
See our Affiliate & Advertising Disclosure for full details.
Contact
Questions, corrections, or feedback? I genuinely want to hear from you, especially if you've spotted an error. Get in touch.