| VIN-numbers |
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VIN numbers was introduced in the mid-1950's, and in 1980 a standard was set that the VIN was to contain 17 digits. It was based on an ISO standard, ISO standard 3779 in this case. It was described in february 1977 and revised in 1983. The VIN numbers may be any character A-Z or number 0-9. However the characters I, O and Q are never used to avoid misreading. Each position in the VIN number describes a particular function. Let's go through these numbers here, to help you understand the table further down. 1. character is the manufacturing country, W being Germany. 2. character is the car manufacturer code, B being BMW. 3. character describes manufacturing division or vehicle type. 4. trough 8. character describes car model features and trim. 9. character is a check digit to verify the previous characters. It can be an X as well. 10. character describes which year the car was manufactured. See table at the end to decode. 11. character identified the manufacturing plant. 12. through 17. character is a sequence number for when it was rolled off the manufacturing assembly line. The last four digits are always numeric. Note! Though this is the official usage of the VIN number, my table below which is based on official data from BMW may be a bit confusing at first. Here's how to use and read it... The series and start and end numbers are the last 7 characters in the VIN. DC56815 would then mean the 816th vehicle produced as model GC81, meaning a left hand drive 750iAL with automatic transmission. GC81 in this case is the 4. through 7. character in the VIN, and these characters are categorized as BMW type in the table. The first 2 characters are always WB. The 3rd character is the manufacturing plant. An overview of these plants will be provided soon. The 4th through 7th character is BMW type, an internal code to identify vehicles easier. The 8th character is also part of the model and trim level, but how it's used for BMWs is uncertain. 9th character is the check digit. 10th character is model year, see table at bottom (coming soon). 11th and 12th character describes a manufacturing serial series, and 13th through 17th is the serialnumber in this series the vehicle rolled off the plant line. The table is sorted on these last 7 digits for your convience. Hopefully this table will help you determine if your BMW E32 is the model you have been informed it should be.
USA means the vehicle was made for export to the United States. You can try and decode my old E32 VIN : WBAGC8102ODC56815 WBA would be Germany, BMW and plant A. GC81 can be found in the first column above. We'll use this to verify later. We check the 11th and 12th position which is DC, and see there's several serial sequences that start with DC. So we check the serialnumber, the last 5 digits. Here we find a match in the table, saying it should be a 750iAL with left hand drive and automatic transmission. The trim and model should also be according to GC81, and we see the VIN contains GC81 at position 4 through 7. 9321 vehicles was made in this sequence. The 10th VIN position is the number 0. This is a 1991 model, even though it should have been the character M. Without giving any guarantees I believe this year table should be correct. Please note that there are known deviations from this table. 1971 - 1 And so on... |
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