What does your vehicle identification number, or VIN, say about your car or truck?
More than you can imagine, but you’ve got about as much chance of figuring it out on your own as Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Your car’s VIN is its life story, but it’s in code. Countless people use VINs every day: owners, shoppers, dealers, automakers, insurance companies, regulators, services like Carfax and more.
VINs can be used for everything from tracking repair records to figuring out which vehicles got a faulty part so an owner can be notified — like the dangerous airbags that led to some of the auto industry’s biggest recalls.
The VIN is on the dashboard in front of the driver’s seat. It’s visible through the windshield. It’s also often on the sticker inside the driver’s door.
Searching for a Million-Dollar Car
VINs — not “VIN number” because the “N” stands for “number” — are a language, and there are translators. Some are free.
The government offers VIN decoders to see whether there are any open recalls on a vehicle and figure out where it was built.
Hagerty, the largest insurer of classic cars, uses VINs to authenticate and determine the value of vehicles — including those built before 1981, when the U.S. government set VIN standards that are now almost universal.
VINwiki has 570,000 subscribers, mostly collectors trying to find or authenticate a specific car.
For instance, VINwiki founder Ed Bolian used VINs to figure out how many Lamborghini Murciélago LP640s were built with a manual transmission, find one, and watch its value soar when he told people just 23 were sold in the United States.
Fixing Problems Before They Happen
Modern VINs have 16 or 17 characters. Not digits: characters. VINs include letters. But never I, O or Q — they’re too easy to confuse with 1, 0, and 9.
The information VINs provide is constantly evolving as vehicle features change to include new power sources — electric, hybrid, etc. — safety features and more.
“It’s crucial information to know what features are selling or track problems with a component or technology,” S&P Global Mobility automotive analyst Tom Libby told me.
For example, automakers or regulators can crunch the data from a huge number of VINs to see whether a specific part, supplier or feature is related to a particular issue. If yes, they’ll know which other vehicles are subject to the issue and recall them before anything goes wrong.
The ABCs of VINs
- 1st character: Country of origin
- 2nd: Manufacturer (GM, Toyota, etc.)
- 3rd: Brand (Buick, Chrysler, Lexus, etc.)
- 4-5: Model (F-150, Camry, Corvette, etc.)
- 6th: Body style (Sedan, pickup, etc.)
- 7th: Safety features (Seat belts, brakes, etc.)
- 8th: Engine type (V-8, EV, etc.)
- 9th: Check digit (A character used to make sure the VIN’s legitimate. Some foreign VINs omit this.)
- 10th: Model year
- 11th: Assembly plant
- Final six digits: Serial number. Unique to the vehicle, it tells when it came off the assembly line.
Some Cars Are a Mystery
Only the serial number is a straightforward string of numbers: a running count of production. In other cases, a single character denotes a nexus of information: a four-digit year, for example.
It gets dizzying, and an incorrect character anywhere can create chaos: Which one was wrong? Are the others correct?
Like the archeologists who cracked the Pyramids’ code, wringing all the information from a VIN requires skill, encyclopedic knowledge, and occasionally luck or inspiration.
That’s even more true of vehicles built before VINs were standardized in 1981, when every automaker created its own system.
In the auto industry’s early days, most manufacturers just kept a running count of production and stamped it on the engine as each vehicle came off the assembly line.
As models and features proliferated, automakers’ numbering systems got more elaborate. That complicates establishing a vehicle’s pedigree. Owners and restorers who swapped the original engine exacerbated the uncertainty.
Companies like Hagerty, VINwiki and auction houses RM Sotheby’s, Barrett-Jackson and Mecum help authenticate vehicles from those days, sometimes after investigations rivaling “Knives Out.”
“Our clients can look up virtually any VIN,” John Wiley, Hagerty director of valuation analytics told me.
Add a Comment