DETROIT – Everyone who has a car or has examined the entire set of documents about cars knows what Vehicle Identification Number is. Even those who have not purchased a car yet could hear from more experienced colleagues about decoding the VIN. What are these mysterious set of characters that is assigned to each manufactured vehicle?
VINs are often situated in several places on the car body, and for different companies these places are different. Even within one company, different models are marked with VIN in different spots. If you own, say, a Chevrolet, and still not sure where its VIN is indicated, visit https://www.faxvin.com/vin-decoder/chevrolet and check where you can find it in different models. However, let’s recall that the first VIN-codes were assigned to American cars since the 1950s. Nevertheless, they were not standardized despite the fact that the system invented by the Americans proved to be quite effective. It was impossible to decode the VIN without an extensive guide. Each manufacturer set its standards for making vehicle identification numbers. It was not convenient at all, so in the 1980s, the US State Department for Transport issued a law under which all cars of the American market were marked with a special VIN developed already according to a uniform standard.
Decoding The VIN Is Not As Complicated As It Seems
Many people memorize it by heart, and then they can find the necessary repair part for their car, relying on the data from the car’s VIN. If you want to decrypt the VIN code of your vehicle, just analyze its structure and check the number on the specialized site of the manufacturer. You will get complete and detailed information about your car, its technical characteristics, and other aspects.
The structure of the VIN was divided into several parts, each of which indicated its parameters, such as the configuration, the manufacturer, etc. In some ways, VIN-code can be considered the DNA of any vehicle. It is available in almost every car and hides its individual information. Interestingly, only Japan does not accept VIN-standardization of the internal market. They use Frame-structure, which, however, is very similar to VIN-code.
Decoding The VIN Code
How to decode the VIN? To do this, you need to know that VIN is a 17-unit code of English letters and characters (except I, O, and Q, since they are very similar to numbers 1 and 0). In this case, the entire number is strictly divided into sections that contain:
- information about the manufacturer;
- the country of manufacture;
- the year of manufacture;
- the body number.
All this information is ordered according to the ISO 3779-1983 standard, by which the VIN-code structure is created.
In general, the simplest way to decode the VIN number of your car is using only specialized sites. All the necessary information about those who produced cars stores in their database. However, for the article, this will be too much information, which you can hardly understand quickly.