VIN Question

The product month and year is usually on the driver's door plate with the VIN? Or is this just other cars you're researching; you just have the VIN?

 

This might have something, pretty complicated read:

Vehicle Identification Numbers (VIN codes)/Toyota/VIN Codes - Wikibooks, open books for an open world

 

how many in your color and package did they have?

 

wow. i wouldn't think the dates would be too far apart, and thinking to sell you the oldest one is giving them far too much credit.

 

that's more like it.

 

When did you buy it?

 

Yeah that's getting on a bit. No big deal though. A neglected 12 volt battery would be the main thing to look out for, I think.

Our 2010 really "languished on the lot", 15 months, albeit at the back of an enclosed shed. About 15 kms, dusty as heck, but no problems other than a dead 12 volt, dealership replaced without argument.

 

I just know that the beginning letter is where the car was manufactured like mine it starts with a j and was made in Japan... I hope

 

I’m not sure that Toyota frame numbers, for a particular model, are always monotonically increasing with time. I haven’t made a serious investigation, but I’ve seen some out-of-sequence ranges in recall notices and service bulletins. Remember that Tsutsumi Plant (PDF) has two production lines but only one plant code (3); for the liftback Prius for the U.S. market, I believe Line 1 begin at 30xxxxx and Line 2 began at 35xxxxx.

Since the seventeen-digit VIN itself encodes only the model year (H = 2018), the only sure ways to know the production date are to check the month and year on the certification label, as @Mendel Leisk kindly mentions, or to search Toyota’s database by VIN to find the month, day, and year. This can be done on the Vehicle Inquiry page, available by subscription to techinfo.toyota.com, which also shows the engine serial number.

The rest of the information on the Vehicle Inquiry page (features, exterior and interior colors, factory- and port-installed options) is similar to that found on the public Toyota Vehicle Specification page, which shows the in-service date, after the car has been sold, but not the production date.

For vehicles sold in the United States, NHTSA receives (under 49 CFR Part 565) and posts VIN decoding information in their Manufacturer’s Information Database. This contains, for example, explanations of the VIN digits for the Prius (PDF, revised August 2017) and Prius Prime (PDF, revised September 2017).

If you already know the make, model, and year, the rest of the VIN doesn’t tell you all that much. Indeed, Toyota identifies cars built for the Japanese market by model code (ZVW52 for the Prius Prime) and seven-digit frame number, equivalent to the last seven positions of a VIN used in other markets.