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VIN decoder

Seventeen characters that say who built the car, where, and in which model year. Paste one and it is read here in your browser request — never sent to anyone else, and never stored.

On the windscreen at the base, on the driver door pillar, and in the vehicle documents.

What this can and cannot tell you

Positions 1 to 3, 9, 10 and 11 are set by an international standard, so the marque, the model year, the check digit and the plant are read the same way on every car. Positions 4 to 8 are the manufacturer's own, and there is no public key to them — so no honest decoder gives you the trim or the engine from a VIN alone.

Our manufacturer table carries 144 codes and is written by hand. A code it does not hold is a gap here, not a problem with the number.

Information, not instruction

CarGeek is a reference, not a service manual. Its pages are written from public sources and from what other people have found, never from a manufacturer's own service information, so they can be wrong or incomplete for your particular vehicle. Some of what they describe carries real risk: high voltage, fuel under pressure, stored energy, hot and moving parts.

Have anything you intend to act on checked by a trained person against the manufacturer's own procedure for your vehicle. Nothing here replaces that procedure.