Ferrari Mondial . Net

What is a VIN?

Well it’s a Vehicle Identification Number, and should be present in several places on all cars made after 1980.

I found an excellent online guide for decoding Ferrari VIN numbers here (they have not added the latest models to the code list, but you can probably guess them, it’s certainly handy for cars up to 1996):

http://www.nwrfca.org/faq/vin.html 

The guide also tells you where to find them on the vehicle. Clearly they should all match, and not appear to be tampered with in any way! I’m guessing that dodgy practises such as “ringing” doesn’t happen much in the classic car trade, but with some shady characters out there (potentially posing as respectable private traders) it can’t hurt to check.

It’s also probably a bad idea to reveal or inadvertently publish your VIN, registration number and tax disc (eg by posting photos on the web) in case some kind of criminal elements are out there watching, I imagine this information could be used in the practise of “cloning” (good BBC article on car cloning). So always remember to blank out this information in any photos you post on the web!

From decoding my forthcoming VIN I can verify that the information elucidated from the VIN
did indeed match up with the physical form of the car. I was a little worried though when I did an HPI check via www.mycarcheck.com, the car info was fine, but on performing the additional VIN check it reported that the VIN I had entered did not match those on record for the vehicle. I was a little baffled, but called mycarcheck.com the next day. It turns out that the DVLA only had the last 5 digits of the VIN (this would be the unique part of the code anyway), and these indeeded matched, so that was a relief

If only this one was mine…

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 24th, 2007 at 11:39 am and is filed under Ferrari, Mondial, buying. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.