VIN Decoder to Vehicle Specs (NHTSA)

Turn a list of VINs into clean vehicle specifications: make, model, year, trim, body class, drive type, engine (cylinders, displacement, fuel), transmission, plant, and manufacturer. Powered by the official NHTSA vPIC database, the US Department of Transportation's free vehicle product information catalog. No key required, and no personal data: vPIC returns vehicle specifications only, never owner or registration information.

Input

• VINs: one 17-character VIN per line. Lowercase and spaces are cleaned up. You can add an optional model year per VIN to help decode older or ambiguous VINs.
• Max delivered VINs: cap on billed rows (0 = no cap).

Output

One row per VIN that decodes to a real vehicle, with the specification fields above plus provenance: sourceUrl (the NHTSA vPIC decode for that VIN, open it to verify every field), retrievedAt, confidence, and dataSource.

How it works

Every field is copied from the NHTSA record. Nothing is inferred or guessed: a field NHTSA does not have for a vehicle is left null, never filled in. VINs are decoded in batches against the official endpoint, so a large list stays fast and cheap.

A VIN that does not decode to a vehicle is written to a free rejected dataset with a plain reason, and is never billed. That includes VINs that are not 17 characters or contain letters a VIN cannot have (rejected before any lookup), and VINs NHTSA cannot resolve (for example a manufacturer not registered for US roads). Duplicate VINs are decoded once.

Confidence

• 1.0: NHTSA decoded the VIN clean and the check digit is correct (vPIC ErrorCode 0).
• 0.8: NHTSA decoded the make, model, and year, but flagged the 9th-position check digit (vPIC ErrorCode 1). The specifications are still from the record; the note is about VIN integrity, not the data.

Billing

Pay only per VIN that decodes to a real vehicle. There is no per-run start fee. VINs that do not decode cost nothing.

Sample output

A real run decoding VINs against NHTSA vPIC:

VIN	make	model	year	body	fuel
1HGCM82633A004352	HONDA	Accord	2003	Coupe	Gasoline
1FTFW1ET5DFC10312	FORD	F-150	2013	Pickup	Gasoline
5XYZUDLB3JG514659	HYUNDAI	Santa Fe Sport	2018	SUV/MPV	Gasoline
JM1BL1V72C1234567	MAZDA	Mazda3	2012	Sedan/Saloon	Gasoline

Every row carries a sourceUrl to the NHTSA decode, for example https://vpic.nhtsa.dot.gov/api/vehicles/DecodeVinValues/1HGCM82633A004352?format=json. VINs that do not decode route to the free reject dataset.

See also

More clean, pay-only-for-results data tools from Pono Data:

• Barcode to Nutrition - UPC/EAN to product and nutrition facts
• ZIP / Postal Code to Geo - postal code to city, state, lat/lon

Full catalog: https://apify.com/thoob