VIN Decoder

What a VIN tells you — and what it does not

A Vehicle Identification Number is a 17-character code every car built since 1981 carries. It is an identity, not a history: it describes how the vehicle left the factory. Decoding it returns the manufacturer, plant, model year, body style, engine and the safety equipment fitted as standard. It does not return who owned the car, whether it has been crashed, what the odometer really reads, or whether a recall repair was ever carried out.

How the 17 characters break down

Positions 1–3

World Manufacturer Identifier — country and manufacturer. 1, 4 and 5 are the United States; 2 is Canada; 3 is Mexico; J is Japan; W is Germany; K is South Korea.

Positions 4–8

Vehicle descriptor — model, body style, engine and restraint system. The exact meaning is manufacturer-specific.

Position 9

Check digit. Calculated from the other 16 characters, so a mistyped VIN usually fails arithmetically rather than silently decoding to the wrong car.

Position 10

Model year. The code cycles every 30 years, so a decoded year is read together with the plant code.

Position 11

Assembly plant.

Positions 12–17

Serial number — the individual car.

The letters I, O and Q never appear in a VIN — they are excluded to avoid confusion with the digits 1 and 0. A code containing any of them has been mistranscribed.

Where to find it

Look through the windshield at the base of the driver’s side, on the sticker inside the driver’s door jamb, or on the vehicle registration and insurance documents. All three should match. If the plate through the windshield disagrees with the door jamb, stop and ask why before going any further.

What to check next

Decoding tells you what the car is. For whether it is safe, check the recall record and owner complaints for that model year. For title history, odometer records and theft status — none of which we hold — use NMVTIS, the federal title database.

Decoding is performed by NHTSA’s public vPIC service. We do not store the VINs entered here.