What a VIN says — and what it never says
Seventeen characters tell you what the car was BUILT as. They tell you nothing about what happened to it afterwards. Start with the check digit: it catches a single mistyped character before you drive across the country to see the car.
Spaces, dashes and lower case are fine. The letters I, O and Q are never used in a VIN — we read them as 1 and 0, so a mistake in copying does not stop the check.
How the seventeen characters are laid out
| Position | What it is |
|---|---|
| 1 | Region and country of the plant |
| 2–3 | Manufacturer. Together with the first character this is the WMI |
| 4–8 | Set by the manufacturer: body, engine, trim. No common decoding |
| 9 | Check digit — the only character that can be verified by arithmetic |
| 10 | Model year, on a thirty-year cycle |
| 11 | Assembly plant, in the manufacturer's own coding |
| 12–17 | Serial number of this particular car |
What a VIN never tells you
Mileage, accidents, repairs, outstanding loans, how many owners there were — none of that is in the number. Those live in separate registers, and each country has its own. Anyone promising to read them from seventeen characters is selling you a guess.
What does tell you about the car's life are its own fault codes, its readiness monitors and its freeze frames. That is what an adapter reads. What a scanner shows before you buy.