What the first three characters of a VIN tell you

The first three characters of a VIN are the World Manufacturer Identifier, or WMI. Look the three characters up in NHTSA's list and you get the company that registered them, the vehicle type and usually a country. NHTSA's catalog holds 3,163 three-character WMIs, and the first character alone already narrows things down: in the catalog, codes starting with 1, 4, 5 or 7 are registered in the United States in 91 percent of cases.

What the first character tells you

The first character groups codes by where their holders are registered, and the catalog shows the pattern clearly. Codes starting with 2 are mostly Canadian (164 of 199), codes starting with 3 mostly Mexican (149 of 185), J belongs to Japan (83 of 104), W to Germany (60 of 81) and L to China (152 of 193).

Some first characters are shared. R is split between Hong Kong (35 codes), China (26) and Taiwan (17). The country NHTSA stores is the one recorded for the company holding the code, so the first character and the recorded country do not always agree.

One manufacturer, many prefixes

A WMI does not identify a brand. It identifies the registrant, and a large group registers many. Honda passenger cars registered by American Honda carry 1HG, while those registered by Honda Motor Co., Ltd. in Japan carry JHM. The two share models: the rules for 1HG name 13 models and those for JHM name 14. Which code appears on a vehicle depends on the registrant, not on the model name.

The reverse also happens: a single code can cover several makes. Each code page on this site lists the makes NHTSA links to it.

In the catalog, 355 three-character codes are linked to two or more makes, and 118 to four or more. The widest is 4YD, with 41 makes.

When the third character is a 9

A 9 in position 3 changes the rules. It marks a manufacturer that builds fewer than 1,000 vehicles of a type a year, and its identifier then continues in positions 12, 13 and 14. NHTSA lists 9,849 of these six-character codes, most of them trailer builders. Read the first three characters alone and you only know the region and the shared prefix; the full code needs all six. The guide to six-character codes covers them.

Codes without a stated country

Not every record carries a country. The first character 7 is the clearest case: of 482 codes starting with 7, 140 have no country in the catalog, while 341 are registered in the United States. In total 1,247 codes, three- and six-character together, have no country recorded. This site leaves the country out for those rather than guessing it from the first character.

Reading a prefix in practice

Take the first three characters, check whether the third is a 9, and look them up. The VIN checker does this against the full list and also reads the model-year character and the check digit. Each profiled code has its own page with the models its decoding rules name, the plants they mention and the other codes held by the same company. The index of codes sorts all of them by first character.

What sits behind a code

A code is more than a name. For 3,135 of the 3,163 three-character codes, NHTSA also holds decoding rules: the model names, body classes, fuels and plants that the remaining characters of a VIN translate into. For 28 codes there are no rules at all, so a VIN starting with them can be traced to its holder but no further. Rules for 2,414 codes have no end year.

Among the codes that start with 1, 4, 5 or 7, the most common vehicle type is trailers, with 1,356 of 1,966 codes (69 percent), against 90 for passenger cars. In the American range, a code picked at random is therefore more likely to belong to a trailer builder than to a carmaker.

Within one first character, the second character often groups a single holder. The catalog lists 26 three-character codes starting with 1G, and 22 of them are held by General Motors companies. The pattern repeats with 1F, where 9 of 14 codes belong to Ford companies.