How to Check a Vehicle's VIN Code?
2 Answers
Locations to check a vehicle's VIN code: 1. Below the door; 2. Left side of the front windshield; 3. Inside the engine compartment or on the driver's door pillar; 4. On the vehicle insurance certificate or vehicle registration card. The vehicle's VIN code consists of 17 letters and numbers, each representing: 1. The 1st digit indicates the country or region of manufacture; 2. The 2nd to 3rd digits represent the manufacturer and vehicle type; 3. The 4th to 8th digits provide information on the vehicle's category, series, body type, and engine type; 4. The 9th digit is the check digit; 5. The 10th digit indicates the model year; 6. The 11th digit is the assembly plant code; 7. The 12th to 17th digits represent the production serial number.
Every time I teach friends to check the VIN, I tell them to first look under the lower left corner of the windshield – there's usually a small transparent window revealing the 17-digit code. However, last time when helping my neighbor inspect a used car, we encountered an unexpected situation: the VIN plate on her older SUV model was actually hidden beneath the rubber seal on the driver's side door frame. Honestly, the most reliable method is to pop the hood – the metal plate at the front of the engine compartment always bears the VIN, and it's also commonly found on the firewall area below the wipers. By the way, the vehicle registration certificate and insurance documents definitely contain the complete chassis number – I recommend taking photos of these paper records as backups. In cases where the original VIN is unreadable due to collision damage, some vehicle models have secondary stamped codes in places like the spare tire well or along the side of the front passenger seat rails.
