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How to determine your vehicle's model year

In this article, we will review some reasons why it may be confusing to determine your car's real model year, and show you how the Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) can be used to accurately determine the model year, at least for vehicles made since 1981.

DETERMINING THE CORRECT MODEL YEAR CAN BE CONFUSING
 
A vehicle's model year may seem like an easy fact, but not everyone has accurate information about their own car's or truck's model year for some of the following reasons:

• If you bought your car in August of 2014 it's easy to assume it's a 2014 model when it's actually a 2015. That's because most vehicle manufacturers start selling next year's models in the summer of the prior year.
• If you bought a vehicle in January 2013 you may incorrectly assume it's a 2013, when in fact, you bought a "leftover" 2012 model. Legally, the dealer must register the car as a 2012, no matter in what year it's sold.
• There is a label on the car, typically in the driver's door jamb, called the FMVSS (Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard) label. By law, it states the month and year of manufacture. Your truck's label may show that it was built March 2011, and you therefore conclude that 2011 is its model year. However, your truck might be a 2012 model, because vehicle manufacturers are allowed to start selling any given model year vehicle in January of the preceding year.

Incorrectly identifying your vehicle's model year can lead to the ordering of incorrect parts and the nuisance of returns and exchanges. If you are at all uncertain about your vehicle's model year, read on for advice regarding how to make that determination.

THE STANDARDIZED VIN STARTED IN THE 1981 MODEL YEAR

Before the 1980s, vehicle manufacturers created their own vehicle identification numbers (VINs) of varying alphanumeric characters as they saw fit to identify facts about their cars and trucks as there was no standard across the industry. So Ford, Toyota, VW, etc., used their own set of characters. To ease the confusion, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) created a mandate that all vehicles sold in the U.S. by model year 1980 would have standardized 17-digit VINs that conformed to a uniform set of guidelines. Because of departmental delays, the new coding system for VINs didn't go into effect until the 1981 model year. These guidelines included a requirement that "model year" be encoded as the 10^th digit within the 17 digits.

VIN CHARACTER 10: SALTW1949(4)A8123456
The correct way to verify the model year of this vehicle is to look at the 10^th character of the VIN as specified by the DOT to signify model year. As you see above, the 10^th character is a "4", indicating a 2004 model year vehicle. Below is a chart displaying the alphanumeric characters used as the VIN's 10^th digit since the current labeling system began.

 
(AutoBlog.com)