Methodology

Every figure on a state page — statute citation, interlock duration, SR-22 period, reinstatement fee, approved vendor, points threshold, suspension cause, expungement rule — is taken from a primary source: the statute or administrative code as published by the state, or the official page of the state licensing agency (DMV, DPS, MVD, BMV, or equivalent).

Secondary sources are not used as the basis for any value. News reports, law-firm websites, insurer guides, and vendor marketing pages may prompt a re-check, but the record is only updated when the primary source confirms the change.

For each verified value, the record stores the official URL it was taken from and a verbatim excerpt from that page. That evidence file is published for every verified state at /data/evidence/ (one data file per state, free to reuse under CC BY 4.0) and is reviewed before a state is marked verified. It is the reason a state can be shown as "verified" rather than merely "written", and it lets anyone check a value without taking the site's word for it.

Quotations are kept in English exactly as the source publishes them, on the Spanish pages as well: a translated statute is a paraphrase and no longer evidence, so the Spanish explanation accompanies the quotation without replacing it.

Source retrieval, quote extraction and the monthly drift checks are automated, and records are compiled with language-model assistance working from the primary sources listed on each page. The editor approves every record before it is marked verified. Records are not reviewed by a licensed attorney, and nothing on this site is legal advice.

Corrections sent to corrections@wheelsback.com are checked against the primary source; a confirmed correction is published with the change logged on the record's history.

Where an official source says on its own page that its text is out of date, the record built from it is held: the page is published so the reader can see the state of the research, but it is kept out of search engines and its verification panel reports it as unverified until the current text has been checked.

WheelsBack is edited by Ryan, a software engineer, not an attorney. He built and runs the verification system: every figure is stored with the statute, regulation, or agency page it is quoted from; an automated pass re-reads each quotation on its official page and reports any change; pages that block automated reading are re-checked by hand at re-verification; a record unchecked for one year carries a dated notice, and one unchecked for two years is withdrawn from search engines. Nothing on this site is the editor's interpretation of the law.

State pages are not reviewed by attorneys unless a named reviewer appears on that page.

Each state record stores the date it was last checked against its sources. That date is printed at the bottom of the state page and reported to search engines as the page's last-modified date. A second date beside it shows when the cited sources were last re-read automatically and found unchanged; it advances every month the check passes, and stays put for any state where a quote no longer matches until a person has looked.

A record must be re-verified at least every 365 days. A re-verification task is opened automatically about three months before a record reaches that age. When a record passes it, every page for that state shows a dated notice saying the record is due for re-verification. At twice that age the state's pages are withdrawn from search engines until it is checked again. Both rules are applied automatically every time the site is published, so an outdated page cannot reach search engines by oversight.

Between verifications, automated checks run on a schedule: every source URL cited on a state's main page is tested weekly for dead links; every quoted passage on every page, including the SR-22, reinstatement, hardship, suspension and record-clearing pages, is re-fetched monthly — and again just after the January 1, July 1 and October 1 effective dates common to state legislation — to confirm the quoted text is still on the page; and each state's approved-vendor list is compared with the live agency list monthly. A quote that has vanished from a page that otherwise loads opens a review task; the value is not changed until a person has read the source. Pages that only render in a browser are read with one; where an agency's site refuses automated readers altogether, the newest Internet Archive capture stands in — only if it is at most 120 days old, and those quotations are counted and labelled apart from the ones re-read live. The last automated pass, on October 10, 2026, re-read 3,694 quotations across 51 states on their official pages and found them unchanged; 189 more sit on pages that block automated reading and are checked by hand at re-verification.

State pages describe the general rule and cite it. They do not analyze how a rule applies to a particular offense, prior record, blood-alcohol level, or court order. Those determinations depend on facts specific to the individual and are the domain of the court, the licensing agency, and licensed counsel.

The site does not list installer locations. Vendor entries link to the vendor's own location tool and to the state agency's approved-vendor list.

To report an error, email corrections@wheelsback.com with the state, the field in question, and a link to the primary source. Corrections supported by a primary source go live with the next update and are recorded, with the source, on the record's change history and on the record-changes page. The verification date changes only when the whole record has been re-read against its sources; a single corrected field does not reset it.