Member Article

What is the Vin Number?

Oddly enough, many car owners are not quite aware of the existence of the vin-code of the car. Nevertheless, the significance of the vin code is the fact that it contains many important and useful information. The vin-code is known to be a unique vehicle identification number assigned to it by the manufacturer with the release of the car off the line.

Vin Code Specifications

The vin-code is assigned to all vehicles that has been manufactured since 1980. The format of the vin-code cars is described in ISO 3779, which was adopted in the United States and Canada in 1977; the vast majority of European manufacturers adhere to this standard up till now.

In most cases, vin number of car consists of 17 characters, and it can not use the Latin letters I, O and Q (primarily because of its similarity to the numbers 1 and 0).

Each character or group of characters in the vin-code carries a well-defined information. The following is a transcript of the vin-character code that is used by most car manufacturers:

The first three characters of vin-code show the world the code (zip code) of the manufacturer of the vehicle. The first character means the country where the car was released, the second - the manufacturer, the third - the type of vehicle (car, truck, and so on.) Characters from the fourth to the eighth show the main specifications of the car (model, engine type, body type, series and so on) The ninth character of the vin-code play an extremely important role. It is a check digit, which is determined by the correctness of the vin-code. If a vin-code is incorrect, most likely, some of his characters were killed, which is usually done on a stolen car. Consequently, the check digit can determine if the car was stolen with high probability.

The vast majority of buyers who are able to at least partially decrypt vin-code, are primarily interested in where is the vin number and the tenth symbol that characterizes the model year of the car.

For example, the character “A” indicates that the care was released in 1980, the symbol “M” - in 1991, a symbol of “4” - in 2004, and so on.. Some manufacturers may, for example, indicate the year of the car manufacture not within the 10th, but within the 11th character. Such procedure was adopted by some Ford manufactures. All the rest of manufacturers traditionally indicate the place of manufacture within the eleventh letter.

The numbers from the twelfth to the seventeenth characterize the sequence of passage of the vehicle on the line and represent the number of the car body.

If necessary, you are welcome to learn more about where to find vin and check the vin-code of your car to make sure that it is OK. This can be done at epicvin.com on the Internet as a variant, both free of charge and on the paid basis. Good luck!

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Yaroslav Karpenko .