Small manufacturers and the 9 in position 3

When the third character of a VIN is a 9, the manufacturer code is six characters long, not three. Positions 1 to 3 give a shared prefix and positions 12 to 14 complete the code. This is the scheme for manufacturers building fewer than 1,000 vehicles of a type a year, and in NHTSA's catalog it is far more common than the familiar three-character code: 9,849 six-character codes against 3,163 three-character ones.

How the six characters fit together

Take a prefix such as 4S9. On its own it names no single company; it is shared by 469 small manufacturers in the catalog. Each of them gets its own three characters for positions 12 to 14, and the serial number of the vehicle continues only in positions 15 to 17.

Mostly trailers

Of the 9,849 six-character codes, 8,051 are for trailers, 82 percent. Motorcycles follow with 1,103, and low-speed vehicles such as golf carts and neighborhood electric vehicles with 345. Passenger cars, buses and trucks each account for around a hundred or fewer.

Overwhelmingly American

The United States accounts for 8,409 of the six-character codes, 85 percent. Another 968 have no country recorded. By first character, 1 leads with 7,196 codes and 4 follows with 2,059; Canada's 2 and Mexico's 3 have 198 and 198.

A steady flow of new small builders

Six-character codes are added every year. The catalog shows 2,342 new ones in 2017, the busiest year since 2016, and 351 in 2025. In 2026, up to the October release, 250 were added.

Names on this site

Some small manufacturers are registered under a personal name. This site shows a holder's name only when it is clearly a company name; for the others the VIN checker reports the code, vehicle type and country without the name.

Six-character codes outnumber the rest

In every year since 2016, more six-character codes were added than three-character ones. The gap was widest in 2020, with 6.5 six-character codes for every three-character code.

Low-speed vehicles show the same pattern on a smaller scale: 345 six-character codes against 138 three-character ones.

Reading one in practice

Check position 3 first. If it is a 9, write down positions 1 to 3 and 12 to 14 together: that six-character string is the manufacturer code. The serial number then has only three characters left, positions 15 to 17. The VIN checker does this automatically for a full VIN.

Motorcycles and other small builders

Motorcycles are the second-largest group. With 1,103 six-character codes against 478 three-character ones, 70 percent of all motorcycle codes in the catalog belong to small manufacturers. Buses (86) and trucks (104) have far fewer, and passenger cars only 93.

Outside the United States, Canada (151) and Mexico (140) hold the most six-character codes, followed by China (47). The first character 1 alone starts 7,196 of them, 73 percent of the total.

The 9,849 six-character codes sit under 140 different prefixes. The distribution is lopsided: the ten busiest prefixes hold 4,294 codes between them, while 90 prefixes have fewer than ten codes each and the median prefix has 4. Every one of the ten busiest prefixes starts with 1 or 4, the two characters most used by American holders.

Seen from the trailer side, the scheme dominates: 84 percent of all trailer codes in the catalog are six-character codes (8,051 of 9,639). For no other vehicle type is the share as high. The busiest prefix, 4S9, is shared by more small manufacturers (469) than any three-character code has models in its rules.

One code per company, as a rule

Small manufacturers rarely hold more than one code. Of the 9,037 company names shown for six-character codes, 8,796 appear exactly once. The largest holders are Seagrave Fire Apparatus, LLC (4), Ema Motorworks LLC (4), Envirotech Drive Systems Inc (4), Morgan Motor Company Limited (4) and Kann Manufacturing Corporation (4). For 539 codes the holder name is not shown on this site because it reads as a personal name.

Because each small builder gets three characters in positions 12 to 14, a shared prefix can hold up to 33 × 33 × 33 combinations of letters and digits in theory, far more than any prefix uses today. The busiest prefixes in the chart above have a few hundred each.