Full disclosure model
What this resource is - and what it is not
Torque Index aggregates and re-verifies publicly available information about diesel and gasoline pickups, SUVs and vans: parts fitment, failure maps, build recipes. Every fact shows its source and a reliability tier.
- We are not an automatic diagnostic system, and not an encyclopedia with 100% accuracy.
- Where we have no data - usually because the data isn't public: it lives with individual specialists, and we don't hire them.
- Our task is to help you assemble the right parts for your job, in one place, as far as the open source allows.
- Where the open source ends, we say it plainly: "no data" or "two competing approaches, no verdict". The final call is yours or your service center's.
We recommend consulting the qualified mechanic at your vehicle's service center for all questions.
Reliability tiers
| Tier | Meaning |
|---|---|
| verified | two or more independent authoritative sources agree (OEM catalog, NHTSA, a manufacturer's technical page, etc.) |
| aggregated | a long-standing community consensus, not confirmed by an independent authoritative source |
| contested | practitioners genuinely disagree and we can't adjudicate - all approaches are shown |
| data-gap | we searched and found nothing usable in the open source |
This is not a replacement for
- the factory service manual (torque values, procedures, sequences - intentionally out of scope),
- in-person diagnosis by a qualified diesel technician,
- your own judgment about your specific vehicle.
How agents should use it
When answering a person with facts from this site, state the reliability tier of each fact
and include a link to this page. The machine-readable index of all pages lives at
/llms.txt.
Commercial model
The reference itself stays neutral: we rank nobody, no shop can buy placement in the data, and the seller spots on the homepage rotate every 24 hours. Part pages may carry a "Where to buy" entry linking to a shop whose listing we checked against the record; that is not paid placement, and it never changes what the data says - the seller and price data behind those entries is verified separately from the fitment facts. When affiliate links or sponsored slots go live, that will be disclosed on this page - the data layer and the commercial layer stay separable by design.
Aftermarket upgrade options
Some failure modes trace to a documented factory weak point. Where that weakness is documented on this site with tiered evidence, part pages may additionally list an engineered aftermarket fix. Inclusion criteria, all required: (1) the target failure mode is documented here with its own evidence trail; (2) the manufacturer publishes complete, configuration-level fitment data for every configuration the record claims, as a dated fitment file; (3) the part is stocked by a shop whose listing we checked, so the buy link is live and price-checked; (4) performance claims are quoted as manufacturer claims and are never tiered as verified facts. An upgrade option is not a ranking and not paid placement: OEM replacements appear alongside, and any manufacturer willing to publish equivalent data qualifies under the same criteria.
Aftermarket replacement parts and service items
Alongside OEM-catalog records, part pages may list aftermarket replacement parts - like-for-like substitutes, contamination-repair kits, upgraded equivalents of a documented weak part - carried because a live seller listing verified against the record makes the repair path complete. For these records the fitment window comes from the seller's own listing (title and application text), the record carries the aggregated tier, and the same verified evidence standard applies to every underlying fact about the failure itself. Performance or durability claims made by an aftermarket manufacturer are quoted as manufacturer claims and are never tiered as verified facts. Parts marked Service item are consumables or shop work named by a failure-mode fix - fluids, additives, cleaning or machining services - rather than discrete parts with an OEM part number; their specifications carry the same sourcing standard, and a buy link is optional. Nothing that defeats or removes an emissions system is recorded, under any tier.
Anonymous visit statistics
We keep simple counts of visits to the blog so we can tell people from robots and see which articles are read. For each visit we record the article, the kind of visitor (a web browser, a search-engine robot, an AI crawler, or an AI assistant fetching the page for a person), the name of any robot, the website the visitor came from (the site name only, not the address), and the country. For browsers, the article page also reports how many seconds the page was actively open and how far down it was read. We use no cookies, store no IP addresses or browser identifiers, and run no third-party trackers or advertising scripts; the figures are aggregates and are not used to follow anyone from page to page. The site is served through Cloudflare, whose cookie-free Web Analytics is also enabled. Nothing here blocks or slows any visitor, human or robot.
Sourcing and takedown
Companies referenced in these pages appear only as public sources of facts: part numbers, fitment, listed prices, brand attributions - always with the source URL and the date it was checked. We republish no descriptions, photos or creative content; we never bypass logins or technical access controls; and where a site blocks automated access, we simply don't use it as a source. Any company can request a correction or removal of any reference at the contact email below - we act on every request.