How to find out the year of manufacture of a car by body number (vin, wine code), engine number, glass

When buying a used car, it is very important to know exactly the year of its production. There are several ways in which you can find out what year the car was produced.

The easiest way is to look into technical certificate car. If the owner constantly used his vehicle, passed technical inspections on time, then you can completely trust the passport. The year of production is also indicated in the CTP and CASCO policies.

However, there are often situations when there are simply no documents for a car, for example, if the car has been in the garage for a long time or it has been imported from abroad. In this case, you should resort to other methods of determining the year of production.

VIN code

The VIN is a 17-character plate that is usually located under the hood or on the cross member under the front bumper. In any case, the seller must show you the VIN code, you can get a lot of useful information about the car from it, the production date is the tenth character.

Orientation should be as follows:

• years from 1971 to 1979 and from 2001 to 2009 are indicated by numbers 1-9;
• years from 1980 to 2000 are indicated by the letters A, B, C and up to Y (the letters I, O, Q, U, Z are not used for marking).

It is worth noting that this indicates the model year of manufacture. Many manufacturers use their own designation system, for example, the American division of Ford in the 11th and 12th positions of the Vin-code encrypts the exact year and month of manufacture of the car, while Renault, Mercedes, Toyota do not indicate the year of manufacture at all and can only be determined using body plates.

There are many resources on the Internet that can help you decipher the VIN code, with their help you will find out not only the production date, but also the country, engine type, equipment, and so on. If the car was registered and operated in Russia, then the VIN code must be in the traffic police databases. If the code is broken, then not everything is going smoothly with this machine.

Other ways to determine the date of manufacture of a car:

• on the seat belts at the very bottom there is a label with the year of production, it is clear that this method is only valid for new cars and those in which the belts have not been changed;
• on the bottom of the front passenger seat there should be a plate indicating the date of issue, if the owner allows you to remove the seat, you can check;
• on the windshield there is a date of its production, if it has not changed, then the dates will match.

Usually sellers do not need to hide the real date of manufacture of the car, but if you are refused to provide the necessary information, there is reason to wonder if you are buying a pig in a poke.

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