Tom A. Fournier - Comment

We provide an identification and valuation service for state DMV's, Insurance companies, lenders and dealers. About 50 million car, truck and motorcycle VINs are processed through our system each year providing the user with information used for taxation, claims and underwriting as well as financing and trade-in. Our concern is that the model year for vehicles with a GVWR greater than 10,000 lbs. as well as buses, motorcycles, trailers and low speed vehicles can no longer be identified within a 30-year range. It is probable that VIN characters 1-8 and 10 that were assigned from 1980-2009 will be repeated beginning with the 2010 model year. We do not have access to the build sheet with corresponding VIN of every vehicle manufactured so we have devised a VIN mask whereby a combination of certain characters in the VIN finds a match 99.4% of the time in our data files. The concern is that now there will be multiple hits using the same 1- 8 and 10 characters and we will not be able to identify with certainty whether the vehicle in question is a 1981 or 2011. You can imagine the confusion this will cause with the DMV and other agencies. Perhaps I am missing something and this issue has been addressed but after reading and re-reading NHTSA-2008-0022 I don't have the answer. Thanks for reading this.