Why this site exists

Garage Dreams started because really detailed buyer’s guides were hard to find. Look up almost any used car and you will find a specification table, a short overview, or a forum thread where the useful information is spread across forty pages of replies. What you rarely find is one document that tells you what actually goes wrong with the car, what it costs to put right, and what to look at before you hand over any money.

So that is what these guides are. Each one is built by working through owners’ forums, club threads, workshop write-ups, road tests and reviews, then pulling the common problems and the checks that matter into a single guide for that car. The aim is that you can read one page and go and look at a car knowing what to check.

A good buyer’s guide should be just as willing to talk you out of a car as into one.

Who wrote the guides

Ben Frost wrote every guide currently on the site. They are research based rather than first-hand: the information comes from the people who own these cars, fix them, and post about it, gathered together and organised into something you can actually use. Where a guide gives a figure or an interval, it is what the sources and the owners agree on, not a guess.

How the site works now

Garage Dreams is now largely automated. New guides are drafted by one AI model and reviewed by a second before anything is published, and shorter articles are written only from guides that have already passed that review. Nothing goes live unless the site builds cleanly first.

Anything written by a machine says so in its byline, with an AI marker naming the model that wrote it and the model that reviewed it. If a post carries a person’s name instead, a person wrote it.

About the images

A lot of the images on this site are AI-generated, many of the covers at the top of a guide, and any extra views further down it. If an image is AI generated it is labelled underneath with an AI marker naming the model that made it, Some hand-written guides and articles use real photographs instead, with a credit where we know it or if not, we have taken the image and have the rights to it. No AI marker means it is not a generated image.

We have decided to use AI generated images rather than photographs because copy-right trolls are becoming a very big problem online and we don't want to use any images we can't 100% confirm the rights to. Copy-right issues are a very real risk for a small site with a lot of pages.

Treat any AI generated images as decoration, not reference. A generated image gives a fair impression of the kind of car being discussed, but it will not be accurate down to the trim, the wheels or the badge, and it is not a photograph of a real car. The detail you need for an inspection is in the text of the guide, which is where we put the work.

What we will not do

• No invented specifications, prices or service intervals to fill a gap.
• No passing machine-written content off as hand-written, or a generated image off as a photograph.
• No payment for coverage.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, please tell us. That matters more on an automated site, not less, and corrections feed back into the guides themselves. There is a contact page, and a person reads everything that comes through it.