How openvin works

Most of what a VIN tells you is encoded in the characters themselves, under the ISO 3779 standard. No lookup is needed to read it:

1–3

World Manufacturer IdentifierWho built it and where. Character 1 is the region.

4–8

Vehicle Descriptor SectionModel, body, engine and restraint system. Each manufacturer defines its own scheme.

9

Check digitA checksum of the other sixteen characters. Mandatory in North America, optional elsewhere.

10

Model yearRuns on a 30-year cycle, so one letter maps to more than one year.

11

Plant codeThe assembly plant, defined per manufacturer.

12–17

Serial numberThe individual production number.

The letters I, O and Q never appear in a VIN, because they are too easily confused with 1 and 0. If your number contains one, it has been mistyped.

A vehicle built for the Japanese domestic market carries a chassis code instead — something like ZVW30-1234567 or BNR32-123456. A model code, then a production number.

These do not follow ISO 3779. There is no country code, no model-year character and no check digit, and they are not seventeen characters long. Ordinary VIN decoders reject them outright, which is why many services cover Japanese-market vehicles poorly. openvin reads both formats.

The trade-off is that a chassis code carries less information. It identifies the model, not the individual history — and it encodes no year at all.

Every line on a result page is labelled with its source:

• From the number — derived directly from the identifier using published standards and reference tables.
• NHTSA vPIC — the United States government vehicle database, which holds detailed build and equipment records for vehicles sold in North America and partial data for many others.
• NHTSA recalls and complaints — safety recalls and reports filed by owners. Both are published by model year, never by VIN, so they describe the model rather than the individual car.
• EPA — fuel economy from the United States test cycle, shown in L/100 km as well as mpg.
• EU Safety Gate — the European Commission’s recall alerts across 31 countries. These carry no VIN either, so they are matched by brand and model name.

Where sources disagree, the page shows both rather than silently picking one. Model year is the usual culprit: the 30-year cycle makes a single character ambiguous, and outside North America there is no convention that resolves it — so we report the possibilities instead of guessing.

Mileage, accident history, title status, theft records, auction results and previous owners are not encoded in any vehicle identifier. No decoder can derive them, and any service claiming otherwise is reading them from a registration or auction database, not from the number.

A decode confirms what a vehicle is. It cannot tell you what has happened to it.