Note: If a vehicle is manufactured by a “low-volume” company – one that produces fewer than 1,000 of a particular vehicle per year – it will have the number 9 in the third character, as well as in the 12 th, 13 th and 14 th placeholders. The good news is that it’s fairly unlikely that you don’t already know if you own a car or a truck, a bus or a motorcycle. The bad news is that it can be a bit of a hassle to track down your manufacturer’s coding system for that third digit. Each manufacturer uses different codes – and, there’s good news and there’s bad news about that. The third letter or number identifies the type of vehicle it is – a car or truck, for example, or a bus or motorcycle. As reminds us, though, “NOT all Japanese cars are made in Japan and NOT all GM cars are made in America and so on.” Here’s how you can decode that second letter or number in your VIN. The second letter or number identifies the country where the vehicle was made. The first letter or number reveals the continent where the vehicle was made:
World manufacturer identifier (WMI): characters 1 through 3.Today’s VIN contains 17 letters and numbers and is really a conglomerate of three sets of numbers: Not surprisingly, we found conflicting information online, but we were able to track down specifics from the authoritative source, NHSTA, along with other information-rich sites such as. But, if you know the answer about Steve Maxwell, we’d love to hear your info! At some point, we knew we needed to cry uncle and get back to selling car parts, and so we did. Snopes had nothing to say on the matter and a search on Google patents didn’t shed any light, either. True or false? Unfortunately, we don’t know. The VIN, we are assured, “soon evolved” into today’s system. Steve apparently didn’t fully understand the value of his invention, as he apparently wrote it down on the back of a bar napkin and sold the idea to a far shrewder tavern patron for $1,000. Myth busting is fun and, if you look online, you’ll find plenty of places willing to tell you that a man named Steve Maxwell “invented” the VIN. According to DMV.org (a privately owned, non-governmental site), “deciphering these codes is a hobby for some car enthusiasts, including collectors who want to own one of the first or last cars to come off an assembly line.” Plus, of course, it’s a great way to understand the history of your vehicle–or the vehicle you’re thinking about buying. The main purpose of the VIN is to definitively identify a specific vehicle, but its usage goes beyond that. That changed in 1981, when the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) began requiring standardized VINs for any vehicle that took to the road.Īs far as the number’s location in your vehicle, NHTSA says the VIN must be inside the vehicle, and visible through the windshield when you’re looking through the left windshield pillar.
VINs first existed in 1954, but their length and code values were not yet standardized. The VIN (vehicle identification number) of your car has been described as its fingerprint–no other vehicle can have the exact same one, even if the other vehicle is close enough to yours to be its “twin.” It’s also been compared to your car’s social security number.