VIN Basics Blog

While it’s no surprise that ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) has taken the auto industry by storm, there are still many uncertainties when it comes to how your business will be impacted. There are several benefits to these new features, including increased safety and convenience for drivers, and concerns, such as costly repairs, making ADAS a very complex topic that even those selling, insuring, and repairing these features will require clarification on.

In this article, we’ve covered how some auto industry segments have been impacted by ADAS. Read on to learn more.

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Topics: Safety, Automotive Technology, ADAS

This post was updated Dec 2020 with the latest VIN number statistics

Determining the type of transmission installed in a vehicle from VIN alone has traditionally been a challenge. Through the 1990s and even well into the 2000s, most vehicles were offered by OEMs with both manual and automatic transmission options. And, while the NHTSA VIN standard requires OEMs to encode model and engine information into positions 4-8 of the VIN, no requirement exists for encoding transmission type. Even today, while most vehicles are offered with only an automatic transmission, more than 5% of vehicles produced for current model years have standard and manual options available and do not have transmission data encoded in the VIN.

This article explores four common questions about VIN decoding transmission data, and provides suggested solutions for increasing the match rate of decoded transmissions in your inventory or data feed.

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Topics: VIN, Vehicle Equipment

VIN Decoding 101 Part 4: 25 common VIN terms defined

This blog has been updated since its original publish date in Dec 2011

Like almost every area of expertise, VIN Decoding has unique terminology associated with it.  If you haven't worked with a VIN decoder or VIN data in the past, many of these term's meanings may not be intuitive.  Below are the definitions of 25 common terms that you will likely come across as you work with automotive and VIN data.

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Topics: Automotive Data, VIN

In the last ten years vehicle technology, specifically in regard to safety features, has become increasingly complex. These advanced vehicle safety features are often bucketed under the category “Advanced Driver Assistance Systems,” more commonly known as ADAS. While the key motivator of this growth has been driver safety, ADAS will play a larger role for those on the business side of automotive in everything from data collection to lending to titling over the next few years. Some of the most popular ADAS features are: braking assist, adaptive cruise control, lane departure warning, blind spot detection, and rear cross traffic alert.

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Topics: Safety, Automotive Technology, ADAS

This post has been republished with updates since its original publish date in June 2012

While the light-duty and passenger segments encompass a large portion of the vehicles that one might be looking to VIN decode, it certainly doesn't cover them all. These additional segments, such as mid-duty, heavy-duty, and motorcycles, each represent huge markets with large direct and allied business opportunities. As a result, there is a fair amount of interest in services to VIN decode these vehicles.

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Topics: VIN

This post has been republished with updates since its original publish date in April 2012

The NHTSA standard for VIN assignment is applied to all motorized vehicles, motorcycles, and trailers that travel on the roads, streets and highways of the US.  However, the NHTSA has no jurisdiction over recreational vehicles not intended to ever be driven on a street or highway.

These "off-road" recreational vehicles are hugely popular and account for millions of purchases and tens of millions of vehicles in use in the US every year. As a result, there is a need to decode and identify these vehicles for initial sales and marketing efforts, resale, registration, insurance, and taxation. 

Are these vehicles able to be VIN decoded using the same principles and decoders used for light-duty and passenger vehicles? The answer is a solid... maybe.

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Topics: Auto Portals, Automotive Data, Vehicle, VIN, Powersports

While e-commerce has taken the retail industry by storm, there are a few businesses, including dealerships, that have been reluctant to embrace an e-commerce (or digital retailing) business model. Rightfully so. Purchasing a vehicle is a big decision, and many consumers would still prefer to complete some of the steps at the physical dealership, such as test drives and financing.

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Topics: Vehicle Shopping, Roundup

Today’s automotive landscape is much different than 20 years ago, with the average life of a vehicle at a record high of 11.8 years. Automotive manufacturers across the board are building high-quality, longer-lasting vehicles, provided the owner keeps up with maintenance.

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Topics: Automotive Data, Parts & Services, Insurance, Dealers

We are living in a strange time right with a pandemic (COVID-19) that has greatly affected people worldwide and shuttered economies. Millions of people in the United States are out of work (hundreds of millions worldwide) and many businesses have had no choice but to furlough or lay off their employees, or even worse, close their doors permanently.

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Topics: Parts & Services, Insurance, Automotive, Dealers, Fleet Management

As a dealership vendor, it should come as no surprise that dealerships see the largest profit margins from their fixed operations department. In fact, you’ve probably had your hand in the creation of content around this topic on some level, whether it be a comprehensive study or articles on your blog.

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Topics: Automotive Data, Dealers, Service Data