VIN decoder
Decode a vehicle identification number into its country, manufacturer, model year and check digit.
VIN decoder
Paste a 17-character vehicle identification number and this tool breaks it down into the information encoded in each part: the country and manufacturer from the World Manufacturer Identifier (the first three characters), the vehicle descriptor section, the model year, the plant code and the sequential serial number. It also verifies the check digit at position 9 using the North American calculation and flags a mismatch, which is the fastest way to catch a mistyped VIN or a fabricated one on a listing.
Turn off "Verify check digit" if you only want the breakdown without the pass/fail line, and turn off "Explain every position" to get a shorter summary instead of a full position-by-position table. "Output format" switches between a readable breakdown and a compact table, which is easier to scan when you paste several VINs at once — one per line, decoded together with a running count of how many are valid.
VINs never contain the letters I, O or Q, because they are too easily confused with 1, 0 and 9; the tool flags any of the three as an invalid character rather than silently ignoring it. The model year character at position 10 is genuinely ambiguous on its own — the code cycles every 30 years, so "L" means 1990 or 2020 — and the breakdown always shows both possible years rather than guessing. The manufacturer lookup covers a set of common WMI codes; when a code isn't in that set the tool still decodes everything else and says so plainly instead of inventing a name.
Everything runs locally in your browser. A VIN identifies a specific vehicle, so it is not something you should have to paste into a third-party server just to read it — decoding happens on your device and nothing is uploaded. Copy the result, download it as a .txt file, or send it back into the input to decode a corrected VIN.