In practice, each is assigned to a country of manufacture, although in Europe the country where the continental headquarters is located can assign the WMI to all vehicles produced in that region. The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) in the US assigns WMIs to countries and manufacturers. Some manufacturers use the third character as a code for a vehicle category (e.g., bus or truck), a division within a manufacturer, or both. A manufacturer who builds fewer than 1,000 vehicles per year uses a 9 as the third digit, and the 12th, 13th and 14th position of the VIN for a second part of the identification. The VIN consists of 17 characters, and only uses capital letters (excluding I, O and Q) and digits (0-9). For example, Volkswagen started to encode bigger chunks of information during 1995–1997, and the control digit during 2009–2015 for selected models from the group.
These digits identify the specific vehicle and include the model year, manufacturing plant, and the serial number. Whether you’re buying a used car, verifying your own vehicle, or just curious about its factory specs, this tool gives you fast and accurate results. If you still can’t find it, check out our other article on where to find your car’s VIN. Once you have the number, enter it above to start your VIN lookup. Use our VIN decoder to reveal your vehicle’s make, model, engine type, and any open recalls with verified data from the official NHTSA database. NHTSA’s VIN decoder allows you to query a particular vehicle’s VIN to identify specific information encoded in the number.
It has been suggested that this section be split out into another article titled List of common world manufacturer identifiers. On newer vehicles VINs may be optically read with barcode scanners or digital cameras, or Barclays Slots digitally read via OBD-II. This is because a value of one multiplied by 89 (sum of weights) is 89, and 89 divided by 11 is 8 with remainder 1⁄11; thus 1 is the check digit. A VIN with straight-ones (seventeen consecutive 1s) has the nice feature that its check digit 1 matches the calculated value 1. With a check digit of X, the VIN 1M8GDM9A_KP is written 1M8GDM9AXKP042788. Consider the hypothetical VIN 1M8GDM9A_KP042788, where the underscore will be the check digit.