Paste a 17-character Vehicle Identification Number to see the make, model, year, engine, and more.
Type or paste the 17-character VIN and press decode. The page sends it to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's public decoder and lays out the fields that come back: model year, make, model, trim, body style, engine, fuel type and where it was built.
The VIN is on the driver's side of the windshield, on the door jamb sticker, and on your insurance card. Letters I, O and Q never appear in a VIN, because they are too easy to confuse with 1 and 0. If you have typed one of them, you have misread a character.
Take a VIN beginning 1HGCM82633A004352. Position by position, the pieces are:
| Positions | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 1 | Country of assembly — 1 is the United States |
| 2–3 | Manufacturer and division |
| 4–8 | Vehicle attributes: model, body, engine |
| 9 | Check digit, used to validate the VIN |
| 10 | Model year |
| 11 | Assembly plant |
| 12–17 | Production sequence number |
Position 10 is the one people want. In this example the character is a 3, which maps to 2003. The code runs in a 30-year cycle, so the same character will mean 2033 as well — the rest of the VIN tells you which, and the decoder resolves it from the vehicle data rather than the letter alone.
The decoder reports what the manufacturer recorded when the vehicle was built, which is why it can tell you the engine and trim with more confidence than a used-car listing. It cannot tell you condition, mileage or accident history. A clean decode and a clean car are different questions, and the second one needs the car in front of you.
Position 9 is a check digit for vehicles built for the North American market: a weighted sum of the other characters, with a remainder that must match. If a decoder rejects a VIN that looks right, a single mistyped character is the usual cause. Vehicles built elsewhere do not always use the check digit, so a failure there is not automatically a fake.
Model year and registration year are not the same. A vehicle built in late 2025 can be sold and registered as a 2026 model, and the VIN records the manufacturer's designation, not the date of the first sale. If you are checking a listing's year claim, the VIN is the authority; if you are checking the title, the title is.
It does not; you have probably included a space or a stray character from a copy and paste. Count again, and check for a letter O that should be a zero.
No. Mileage lives in service records, inspection databases and the title history, not in the VIN.
No. It decodes factory specification only. A vehicle history report is a separate product with its own sources.
Because the manufacturer did not record it for that vehicle, or recorded it in a field the decoder does not map. Blank is a gap in the data, not an error in the car.
A VIN is visible through the windshield to anyone who walks past, so it is not a secret. The query goes to the NHTSA public API; nothing is stored on this site.
The record comes from NHTSA. This page does not keep a copy.
Last updated: November 2, 2026. Reviewed by David Liu.